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European Journal of and American

X-2 | 2018 Pragmatism and

Paul Giladi and Aaron B. Wilson (dir.)

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/1267 DOI: 10.4000/ejpap.1267 ISSN: 2036-4091

Publisher Associazione Pragma

Electronic reference Paul Giladi and Aaron B. Wilson (dir.), European Journal of Pragmatism and , X-2 | 2018, « Pragmatism and Idealism » [Online], Online since 31 December 2018, connection on 24 September 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/1267 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ ejpap.1267

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Symposia. Pragmatism and Idealism

Introduction to Pragmatism and Idealism Paul Giladi and Aaron B. Wilson

From Idealism to Pragmatism A Matter of Willem A. deVries

Actuality and Intelligibility Hegel and Peirce on Vis-à-Vis Vincent Colapietro

Peirce’s Hypothesis of the Final Opinion A Transcendental Feature and an Empirical Constraint Aaron B. Wilson

Reclaiming the Power of Dewey’s Critical Appropriation of Idealism Jörg Volbers

Voluntarism A that Makes the Difference between and American Pragmatism? Daniel J. Brunson

Conceptualistic Pragmatism Terry Pinkard

Hegel and the of Brandom’s Jonathan Lewis

Essays

Peirce on Musement The Limits of Purpose and the Importance of Noticing Elizabeth F. Cooke

Multilingual

Rosa M. CALCATERRA, Filosofia della contingenza. Le sfide di Genova, Marietti, 2016, 212 pages Francisco Javier Ruiz Moscardó

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Book Review

George Herbert MEAD, Self & Society. The Definitive Edition Edited by Charles W. Morris. Annoted Edition by Daniel R. Huebner and Hans Joas, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London 2015 Guido Baggio

Joëlle ZASK, La Démocratie aux Champs Paris, La Découverte, 2016, 256 pages Céline Henne

Krzysztof Piotr SKOWRONSKI (ed.), John Lachs’s : Critical Essays on His Thought with Replies and Bibliography Leiden-Boston, Brill/Rodopi, 2018. pp. XXX + 336 Glenn Tiller

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Paul Giladi and Aaron B. Wilson (dir.) Symposia. Pragmatism and Idealism

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Introduction to Pragmatism and Idealism

Paul Giladi and Aaron B. Wilson

Introduction

1 Recent years have seen increased interest in the complex relationships between the thought of German Idealists (understood to include both transcendental and absolute idealists) and the thought of those commonly categorized as “American Pragmatists” – from Charles S. Peirce (the progenitor of this alleged tradition) to Richard Rorty and his student, Robert Brandom. This issue presents a collection of papers that, as a collection, do to those complex relationships, neither pretending that idealism and pragmatism are natural allies, nor pretending that they are, essentially, rivals. Readers who seek critical perspectives on these relationships find this issue has much to offer. However, there is also no shortage of on the agreements or points of convergence between idealism and pragmatism. This mixed approach to their relationships, even if it is ultimately more critical than it is positive, reflects the very attitudes of many pragmatist authors toward the thought of German Idealists, from Peirce’s and Dewey’s own mixed evaluations of Kant and Hegel, to Lewis’s rejection of the transcendental a priori in favor of the “pragmatic a priori,” to figures such as Royce, who sees his work as both Hegelian and pragmatist. Inasmuch as pragmatist authors themselves comprise an extended and querulous family, so in relating them to the German Idealists, we only extend that querulous family even further.

2 We begin with Willem deVries’s “From Idealism to Pragmatism: a Matter of Evolution.” Distinguishing between two modern types of idealism, one motivated by epistemological concerns and traceable to Descartes, and the other motivated directly by metaphysical concerns and characteristic of Hegel, deVries argues that pragmatism is distinct from idealism, as pragmatists are motivated most directly by a concern for practice, such as (in Peirce) the practice of . But while pragmatism never falls back into idealism, it has in common with idealism “the priority of system.” Next is

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Vincent Colapietro’s “Actuality and Intelligibility,” which turns to Peirce’s famous criticism of Hegel, that, in his system, Hegel fails to give proper priority to the role of “Secondness” or “active oppugnancy” in experience, making “Thirdness” or reason the primary metaphysical principle. Colapietro argues that, to the contrary, a deeper look at the role of conflict in Hegel’s system shows not only that this criticism is unfair, but also, Hegel and Peirce aside, how akin experience and reason actually are. Continuing with Peirce, Aaron B. Wilson contends that, while Peirce’s philosophy is not consistent with idealism insofar as the latter assumes we can have a priori , Peirce’s “hypothesis of the Final Opinion” can be viewed as a “transcendental feature” of his system, as it explains how knowledge in general is possible; moreover, it does so in a way that resembles the “Absolute” of . However, the hypothesis of the Final Opinion is not epistemically independent of experience, since the hypothesis is an abduction from experience.

3 Turning to other members of the pragmatist family, in “Reclaiming the Power of Thought,” Jörg Volbers examines Dewey’s own ambivalent attitude toward idealism. Dewey at once defends idealism as an historical improvement over authority-based systems, and criticizes it for subordinating practical activity to activity. For Dewey, both forms of activity form a dynamic, temporal whole, which is key to experience and . In “Voluntarism: A Difference that Makes the Difference between German Idealism and American Pragmatism?,” Daniel Brunson examines how Royce’s voluntarism, which treats will as more fundamental (metaphysically) than intellect, offers a way of distinguishing between idealism and pragmatism. Providing rich historical detail, Brunson surveys the thought of and exchanges between Royce, Peirce, Dewey, Schiller and others to suggest how any contest between idealism and pragmatism could be recast as one between and voluntarism. The influence of the early pragmatists notwithstanding, Terry Pinkard’s “Conceptualistic Pragmatism” contends that the thought of C. I. Lewis was the dominate formative influence in the development of post- war pragmatism, providing the framework for , Sellars, Rorty and Brandom. Further, although there are important differences between Lewis and the post-Kantian idealists, Lewis engages the very debates the German idealists had among themselves, thereby passing those debates onto the post-war pragmatists. Finally, in “Hegel and the Ethics of Brandom’s Metaphysics,” Jonathan Lewis examines Brandom’s appropriation of key themes in German Idealism, particularly the normativity of meaning, and argues that, unlike Hegel, Brandom fails to respect the ethical dimensions of this normativity. Brandom mistakenly divorces ethical concerns from meaning normativity; but Lewis suggests that a Hegelian solution to this inadequacy in Brandom would undercut a key assumption of his inferential .

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AUTHORS

PAUL GILADI

Manchester Metropolitan University p.giladi[at]mmu.ac.uk

AARON B. WILSON

South Texas College awilson3[at]southtexascollege.edu

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From Idealism to Pragmatism A Matter of Evolution

Willem A. deVries

1 Pragmatism has long been recognized to have close ties to Idealism. Indeed, there have been arguments that pragmatism must itself be a form of idealism.1 I do not think such arguments hold up, but I would not deny for a second that there is a deep relationship between idealism and pragmatism. I want to tell a story about the changing of idealism that makes sense of their relationship without threatening to collapse one into the other. My story is a history, and idealism’s history began hundreds of year before pragmatism entered the stage, so I beg the readers’ indulgence: it will take me some time to set the table before we are prepared to discuss the relation of pragmatism to idealism. To foreshadow: I take it to be clear that pragmatism has very little in common with the of Berkeley or the problematic idealism of Descartes; the differences between idealism and pragmatism get blurred only because idealism underwent an evolution that so transformed it, not long before pragmatism emerged, that it might seem a small step between them. It was, according to my story, the evolved idealism developed in between 1781 and 1831 that contributed to the formation and development of pragmatism. Yet pragmatism is a large evolutionary step away from idealism, however much it retains and utilizes some of the strengths of late idealistic thought.

1. Epistemologically-Based Idealism

2 First off, then, I would like to distinguish two different kinds of idealism.2 The distinction I draw here is rooted in the motivations for adopting an idealist position. One kind of idealism arises out of epistemological considerations, and has both negative and positive components. There is a localized as a negative component, counterbalanced by positive epistemological and ontological commitments in a different locale. Historically, it arises within a Cartesian framework that assumes that we have direct and incontrovertible cognitive access only to our own mental states, often denominated as . Our knowledge of anything that is not an or a is, then, at best derivative and probable (this is the negative element),

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rather than primary and certain. Since, on this Cartesian view, our own mental states are supposed (once clearly and distinctly perceived) to be transparent to us, the positive elements of the position are the to the of ideas and the epistemological commitment to our knowledge of them. If we stop here, we have what Kant attributed to Descartes and called “problematic idealism” (B274).

3 As Kant notes, it is but a further step to declare that our conceptions of non-mental objects are “false and impossible”; it is certainly the case that they are highly complex and that we can generate at least apparent antinomies that beset our conceptions of the non-mental. If we thus strengthen the negative aspect of the position into a strong (though still somewhat local) skepticism, while retaining our commitment to the being of the mental, we get a position that Kant identifies with Bishop Berkeley and calls “dogmatic idealism” (B274).

4 Kant holds, of course, that his own is neither of these positions. It dispenses with the local skepticism about the material or external world, for the argument of the ‘Refutation of Idealism’ is that our knowledge of our inner states is interdependent and of equal stature with our knowledge of external or material states of affairs. But Kant’s transcendental idealism does not dispense with the skeptical element altogether; rather, it relocates it by drawing a new boundary, not between the inner and the outer, but between the phenomenal and the (really) real. We can and do have knowledge of the phenomenal, which includes both the inner and the outer, but it is all inflected with our own conceptual structure and thus not equivalent to knowledge of a purely mind-independent as such, which remains forever out of our reach.

5 Peirce gives us a closely related diagnosis of the idealism that Kant responds to in his ‘Refutation of Idealism’ and notes the extent to which Kant remains caught in the overall picture that requires some form of direct and immediate presence-based knowledge, which entraps him in another form of idealism. This analysis – admittedly in texts put together by his editors, Hartshorne and Weiss – can be found in volume 1 of his Collected Papers (CP 1.35-39). Peirce sketches there his way out of such , but that is part of a slightly different story, so I will not pursue it here.

6 Kant denies us any knowledge of a purely mind-independent reality. Yet it does seem a bit odd to call his position a form of idealism, for he is not, in the end, committed to the ontological priority or independence of the ideational, certainly not under a standard interpretation of ‘idea.’ (or rather exercises of concepts) and , his equivalent to the ideas of his predecessors, are phenomenal entities (they are at least in time) that are not themselves items of the really real world of things in themselves. Seen in this light, Kant should have found a different name for his own position. Bishop Berkeley has often been called a “subjective idealist.”3 This was a label that Kant insisted did not apply to his own position; the main reason for the revisions in the B edition of the first Critique was to distance himself further from Berkeley’s subjective idealism. Perhaps Berkeley’s position is, in , better called an “constitutive idealism,” because the only objects recognized in his are and ideas; material objects exist only objectively (in the Cartesian sense) in ideas. Then we could free up the label “subjective idealism” to describe Kant’s position, namely that all objects of thought and experience are ‘tainted’ with the structures of our human cognitive framework, so that everything available to a is or mind-dependent. On that reading of “subjective idealism,” the position does not exclude accepting

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objective realism as well, that is, believing in the of a mind-independent reality.

2. Ontologically-Based Idealism

7 I promised two conceptions of idealism, and I haven’t yet discussed the second. This version of idealism is directly metaphysical and is not motivated by any particular epistemological theses. According to this version of idealism, material things and any other things that are not minds or their ideas are somehow lacking in being and therefore not deserving of first-class ontological status. Notice that we could slip the good Bishop Berkeley into this version, for the kinds of incoherence that he thought beset our concepts of material things serve perfectly well to make them unqualified for ontological commitment. But Leibniz is, I think, a purer case of this form of idealism: material objects are merely phenomenal in his fully considered view, because they are merely passive, and anything that is real must be active, something only minds or mind- like items can bring off, in his view. We can think of Leibniz here as taking a cue from : “to be is to have power” ( 247e), 4 and space, time, and material things don’t measure up; thus, they are merely ideal. Hegel adopts a different version of this form of idealism. It turns out, on his dialectical analysis, that material reality and nature do not have the ontological bona fides; they exist in order that spirit may realize itself, and the true measure of the ontologically real is the ability to self-realize.5

8 To the extent that Peirce flirted with what he calls “” (CP 6.24-25), I think we should consider this a flirtation with this second form of idealism.

9 This second form of idealism is unabashedly metaphysical, and it assumes that one has a firm grasp of the criterion of being. Furthermore, this criterion cannot be purely formal; it must have some content to it whereby material things in space and time can be distinguished from the minds, ideas, or mental states that really exist. As various forms of , , or at least have gained ascendency in recent Anglo-American , this form of idealism seems more and more remote, because it seems to be getting more difficult to believe that material things are dependent on the mental rather than the mental being dependent on the material. After all, our investigations of materiality have been yielding interesting, important, and useful results for several centuries now, whereas investigations of the mental or ideal, as such, show comparatively little such progress, at least as of yet. Indeed, much of the progress that has been achieved in the of mind has come from the investigation of the materiality of mind.

3. The Contribution of the Substance Framework

10 As I have said, my story is a historical look at the evolution of idealism. To get a fuller sense of evolution, I am going to cast a glance back to a time before the of idealism, even if it seems like a detour on our road to understanding the relation between idealism and pragmatism.

11 The classical forms of idealism I described in sections 1 and 2 – one a contrast to realism and one a contrast to materialism – were developed within the general framework of the Cartesian approach to mind, and it is important that the Cartesians

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also employed a substance metaphysics. This is a framework that assumes that the basic entities of the world are substances, enduring objects with various and multiple properties, each such object capable of existence on its own – that is, without being the property of some other substance. Each substance has a least one essential property crucial to it that determines its fundamental kind, that is, the conditions of its and individuation. This substance framework, in such an abstract formulation, is itself a formal framework; to be able to apply it, one needs to specify what kinds of things are substances, that is, what properties are such as to determine or specify the object possessing them as a substance, a basic object capable of its own existence independent of inhering in yet some other object.

12 A substance framework is not, on its own, sufficient to generate a strong contrast between idealism and realism (the epistemological contrast) or idealism and materialism (the ontological contrast). We need the combination of the framework of substance together with the New Way of Ideas initiated by Descartes and picked up by his successors on both sides of the English Channel. A brief look at the Aristotelian interpretation of the framework of substance makes this clear.

13 Given ’s hylomorphic construal of the substance framework, one cannot generate a clash between materialism and idealism, because hylomorphism does not generally allow for minds, for psychai, to be independent existences separable from the matter they inform.6 Minds are not the kind of thing that could be a primary substance; psychai are forms that require a matter to inform. An Aristotelian framework is patently realistic, because it clearly recognizes the existence of mind-independent objects. Within that framework, the notion that the fundamental reality of things generally is ideal or mental cannot get off the ground, because (1) not every form is a form of psyche, so there are things uninfected with the mental, and (2) the Aristotelian stands by the claim that it is the same thing that thinks that walks, so material reality is unexpungeable.

14 Only once the Aristotelian hylomorphic framework is abandoned can one generate a real clash between idealism and materialism. Minds have to be thought of as themselves substantive entities that stand in contrast to and independent of material entities. Only then do we get the either/or that makes idealism versus materialism seem like a choice one is forced to make. Traditionally, we think of Descartes as responsible for this move.

15 We could rehearse a related set of arguments to show that it is equally difficult to generate an epistemologically-based idealism/realism contrast, given Aristotelian , but we will not take the time to do that here.

16 This is significant in our context here because, while Peirce was not opposed to employing the substance framework, with some , Dewey is far less enamored of that framework, and thus well inclined to dismiss the contrasts essential to a determinate idealistic doctrine – the contrasts to and to the material – as misleading and confused, just as Aristotle might have.

4. Hegel as Realist and Idealist, but not a Pragmatist

17 So the realism/idealism and materialism/idealism disputes were central concerns in early from Descartes up to Kant, and we can find both

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epistemologically and metaphysically motivated versions of idealism in this period. We have briefly noted that Kant’s transcendental idealism is perhaps less than perfectly named, but I now want to argue that in German Idealism in general (though I will focus solely on Hegel) the realism/idealism/materialism contrast gets complicated enough that it is far from obvious that it remains a genuine contrast between opposing metaphysical views.

18 First off, we need to recognize in Hegel’s philosophy the significance of the distinction between subjective spirit and absolute spirit. There is, in Hegel’s view, no reality external to absolute spirit, but there is a great deal of the real world that is quite independent of subjective spirit (and subjective spirits).

19 Let us also be clear that Hegel is an epistemological realist. That is, he certainly that individual subjective spirits – people like you and me – know and objects that exist quite independently of them. To the extent that Hegel is, indeed, an idealist, his idealism is not motivated by any skepticism about our ability to know material reality or things external to our mind.

20 The principal Hegelian doctrine we need to understand to make some further progress in thinking about Hegelian idealism in this context is the proclamation that “everything hangs on apprehending and expressing the not merely as substance but also equally as subject” (PhG ¶17). This sounds like Hegel is just picking up the of substance and adding to the idea that substance is what there primarily is the further qualification that it is subject as well – but, of course, this means radically re-thinking the notion of substance.

21 Before the Post-Kantians, it was easy to think of substance merely as something underlying and supporting the properties that inhere in it. Those properties may be inactive, like extension, or active, like thinking. As I’ve mentioned, Leibniz was committed to the fundamentally active nature of substance, and in that, he prefigured the Post-Kantians. Kantian (phenomenal) substance is matter, but he thought of matter along Boscovichian lines, that is, in terms of centers of attractive and repulsive forces, and thus not as primarily passive.7 For most of the early modern period, substance as such had no particular material (that is, non-formal) characteristic. That is what makes Locke’s characterization of it as a “something I know not what” trenchant.8

22 Hegel’s dictum that substance is subject puts a very different face on the matter. For he does not mean subject in the sense of the subject of a judgment, but in the sense of the subject who judges. And his conception of subjects of judgment and experience is not a conception of some ‘inner space’ through which various otherwise unconnected representations, whether impressions or ideas, parade. Taking a clue from Kant’s notion of a unity of apperception, Hegel thinks of a subject as an active unifying of multiple items (some of which are indeed representations) received, recollected, generated, and even rejected by it. These items, however, are themselves dependent on their occurrence within the unity of the subject: they cannot be intuitions, representations, or prior to or independent from their place in the overall process of self-unification of the subject, which self-unification is not independent from its fit within a larger environment or context. Because the internal states and the external actions of subjects can be what they truly are only within the context of their overall unification, which itself produces the subject, Hegel thinks of subjects as self- realizing agencies. But finite individual subjects are not capable of self-realization all on their own. The particular unifying activities engaged in by the various subjective

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spirits make full sense only within a larger unifying activity that occurs at a level above that of the individual subjective spirit. In fact, there are several levels here: individual subjective spirits make sense only insofar as they embody the unifying practices of social community, and the whole shebang, Hegel holds, makes sense only as a part and aspect of the self-realizing activity of Absolute Spirit. Hegel’s criterion of being is self- realization, and the Absolute is the ultimate, cannot-fail self-realizer.

23 Hegel thus turns out to be an absolute idealist because reality itself has the kind of being that minds possess. This is not because minds, that is, subjective spirits, are all that really exist, but because reality – everything that is – makes sense, is what it is, as an element in a mind-like structure. But in that case the real/ideal contrast is, essentially, overcome; that is, it is no longer a consequential distinction. The Hegelian view also defangs the contrast between idealism and materialism. Materialists, Hegel thinks, are too focused on what things are made of – but he does not deny that people and communities exist in complex dispositions of material things. Just as Aristotle thought that forms must be realized in matter, Hegel believes that it is necessary that the Absolute realize itself in or through a material nature.

24 I have described elsewhere some of the commonalities shared by Hegel and the pragmatists.9 These include an endorsement of epistemological realism, a rejection of the nexus of doctrines we can call “,” a rejection of the apriori, the employment of a rich conception of experience, an inferentialist/functionalist theory of concepts, the sociality of reason, and, last but not least, an emphasis on centrality of expressed within an external, spatio-temporal world. The discussion here of Hegel’s of the realism/idealism/materialism distinction can be added to the list of what he shares with the pragmatists. Despite all these shared commitments, Hegel is not a pragmatist. I go into more detail in the article mentioned above, but for our purposes the relevant difference concerns the status of the ideal. For Hegel the ideal is the real; the pragmatists, in contrast, the notion of the real is itself an ideal. Hegel’s worldview is ultimately teleological at its very heart; nature is there for the sake of spirit. The telos recognized by the pragmatists emerges from the blind operations of nature; spirit, if we can call it such, emerges from nature, but does not itself draw nature into being.

5. Pragmatism, The Real, and The Ideal

25 There are plenty of references to realism, idealism, materialism and the like among the pragmatists. But, given their rather ginger attitude towards metaphysics generally, the references are almost never straightforward endorsements or rejections. I suggest we look, not at what they say about the ‘isms,’ but about reality itself. Peirce starts off with a fairly traditional approach to reality: “we may define the real as that whose characters are independent of what anybody may think them to be” (Peirce, CP 5.405). But when combined with the ,10 this definition takes on a different aspect: “The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality” (Peirce, CP 5.407).

26 It is worth reflecting a bit on this explanation of reality. In the first few parts of this paper I discussed the framework within which the early modern thinkers argued about realism and idealism. Note that this framework is missing in Peirce’s dictum. Peirce has

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moved well beyond the “new way of ideas” that dominated early modern from Descartes up to Kant. Peirce does not adopt the Cartesian assumption that we know our own mental states first and best or that we have some direct, transparent, and incorrigible cognitive relation to our own mental states. He has a much more sophisticated understanding of what is involved in the notion of representationality and the conditions for being a representation of something. Furthermore, the notion of substance never rears its head; the issue is not what things are “made out of” or what kind of thing ultimately has which properties, or what the fundamental nature of the substance(s) of the world is. The real is what we represent, the object of representing, and the representings are themselves real only to the degree they also are objects of the fated final opinion.

27 One thing to note about Peirce’s characterizations is that realism pretty much falls out of his position automatically.11 The real is the object of our representations – this means that there could hardly fail be something real, unless our representations turn out not to be representations at all and have no objects whatsoever. Of course, Peirce does not mean that the real is the object of just any or all our representations. It is the object of just those that are the enduring product of inquiry, those that are responsive and responsible to sensory experience as well as some other cognitive constraints. We can tell whatever stories we want; we can entertain concepts and thoughts of all kinds, but we are committed to accept as representations of the real only those beliefs that get fixed as a result of the practice of inquiry, properly conducted. And once we’ve gotten clear that ideas or representations, as the medium of thinking, are not thereby also always the object of thought (though they may also sometimes be the object of thought), there is little temptation left to believe that ideas are all that exist.

28 Still, it seems Peirce’s characterization of the real cannot be divorced from the epistemic or the mental. The tie to the epistemic, however, is not in of any connection to , intuitive truth, or revelation, but simply by a connection to truth and the idea that there are proper ways or methods by which to seek the truth. But to be clear, the connection to truth does not itself support any kind of idealistic reading. Is there an idealism hidden in the idea that something is “fated” to be agreed to by all who inquire, because there would have to be some hidden intellectual agency controlling such fates? There is no reason to believe that what Peirce has in mind is any more portentious than what is going one when one says “Well, they’re bound to find out sooner or later that their boy has stopped going to classes and run off with the circus.”

29 Peirce’s characterization of the real is tied to the mental because it refers to opinion and representation. These are the proper subjects of the truth predicate. What is most striking, however, is that both truth and reality, in Peirce’s explanation, are regulative ideals. Truth is not a thing and it is not a relation, not even of correspondence. It is the general aim of inquiry, and its particulars are identified by inquiry properly conducted; that is, it is properly fixed. Thus, coming into possession of the truth (at least with any reliability) depends on proper conduct or practice: that is a basic tenet of pragmatism. ‘Methods’ such as revelation or authoritative pronouncement turn out not to be proper forms of the conduct of inquiry.

30 Frankly, it has never made much sense to me that pragmatism has been accused of falling into idealism. But we can reconstruct what some of the reasoning must have been. One argument is an argument from historical influences: Peirce was expressly

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influenced by Kant and admits as well to influences from Schelling and Hegel.12 They are all idealists of some stripe, so Peirce is as well. A similar argument might apply to Dewey, given his Hegelian roots. But such arguments are notoriously weak: Students, unlike apples, often do fall far from the tree, and it is a good thing too – otherwise philosophy could never really evolve.

31 A different argument would rely on the fact that reality is defined in terms of truth and representation, which are, in turn, regulative ideals. Because of this, it might look like our mental states and activities play an important constitutive role in reality. But it is, of course, far from Peirce’s (and from Dewey’s) mind that we somehow constitute reality (as opposed to experience) by representing it in some particular way. The pragmatist believes that, as far as epistemology goes, our minds are fitted to the world by a combination of evolution and good epistemic practice. The pragmatist does not believe that, epistemologically, the world is fitted to, much less made up from, our minds.13

6. Pragmatism’s Evolutionary Step

32 The influence of idealism on pragmatism cannot be denied. A modicum of reflection quickly reveals several central tenets of (particularly German) idealism that the pragmatists accepted and (mostly) made their own. I mentioned above (1) an endorsement of epistemological realism, (2) a rejection of the nexus of doctrines we can call “Cartesianism,” (3) a rejection of the apriori, (4) the employment of a rich conception of experience, (5) an inferentialist/functionalist theory of concepts, (6) the sociality of reason, and, last but not least, (7) an emphasis on centrality of agency expressed within an external, spatio-temporal world. I would add here (8) articulated holisms of concept and justification.

33 I have discussed these connections between Hegel and the pragmatists elsewhere.14 So I will not go into the details of each connection here. Rather, I want to make a more general . At a level of high abstraction, we can say that what is shared by the German Idealists and the pragmatists is a commitment to the priority of system. This separates them decisively from the empiricist tradition, at least through Mill and his godson, Russell. Atomistic approaches to problems have proven very productive in the natural sciences, and this has been a steady source of inspiration for standard forms of , which held on to the idea that knowledge could be acquired in piecemeal, independent atoms and then assembled and elaborated into the structure we call empirical knowledge. The empiricists also held that metaphysics, to the extent that it was possible at all, must also be a structure of atoms and molecules.

34 Late idealistic thought is a reaction against the overweening of the empiricists. Things do not make sense independently of some context. Kant recognized that representations, in particular, have sense only in the context of a whole representational system, and this imposes certain constraints on anything that counts as a representation. The whole “new way of ideas” blithely assumed that ideas were somehow intrinsically representational: what they represented, their ‘content,’ was somehow built right into their fabric without regard to their relations to the things they represented (if such things existed at all) or even, in the case of simple ideas, their relations to other ideas. When Kant asked the question, “What is the ground of the relation of that in us which we call ‘representation’ to the object?,”15 he moved beyond

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the new way of ideas and opened up a new field of inquiry that we are still plowing. Kant saw that the representationality of mental acts depended crucially on their bearing systematic relations to other mental acts; by the time we reach Hegel that has been extended. Our ability to think depends not only on our thoughts bearing systematic relations to other mental acts of ours, but also on their bearing systematic relations to the mental acts of others and systematic relations more generally to the world within which the whole shebang proceeds.

35 Kant sees a connection between systematicity and design, but it is not a straightforward connection. He does not think that we can infer from the apparent systematicity of the world to its having been a designed creation. But he does think that we need to think of the world as if it is designed in order to be able to discover the often-masked systematicity that must be there if we are to be able to cognize the world. The idea of a well-designed world functions as a regulative ideal informing, inspiring, and constraining our .

36 This complex of ideas undergoes further transformation in Hegel. He has, for instance, no patience with regulative ideals: A purpose that is forever and in principle beyond achievement is no real purpose at all. Hegel also does not draw the same connection between systematicity and design that Kant does. Kant thinks that design has to be someone’s design, the creation of a thinking thing. Hegel’s more naturalistic (and more Aristotelian) interpretation of teleology accepts the notion that there can be and is a natural teleology that is not a form of trying to realize some desire, given one’s beliefs, but something more primitive and more widespread: self-realization, as in an organism.16 Hegel’s notion of self-realization, however, is still modeled on Kant’s conception of the self-constituting unity of apperception; that is, the model on which Hegel conceives the overall systematic unity necessarily found in a world capable of being known from within remains the unity of a mind, now magnified to the ultimate self-realizer, the Absolute.

37 I think the pressures not only to recognize the necessity of systematicity but also to account for it operate just as strongly in Peirce and Dewey as they do in Kant and Hegel. Peirce is certainly even clearer than Kant and Hegel were about the need for systematicity if one is going to make sense of the representationality of thought and our capacity to know the world within which we live. But the model for the nature and origin of that systematicity shifts significantly. Peirce’s new model, one not available to either Kant or Hegel, was also adopted by Chauncey Wright and picked up by the other pragmatists: evolution, not mind. Darwin displaces God, not through apotheosis, but by giving us a model of designerless design that makes the hypothesis of God, as Laplace famously pointed out, not necessary, even if one recognizes the need for systematicity in human knowledge and the world it knows.

38 One might think that Darwin’s model has distinctive limits: doesn’t it apply only to organisms? If that is the case, then it will not account for a more general systematicity in the world, for the realm of the organic is quite limited, as far as we know. Peirce, however, applies the model far more broadly, telling us that “the only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature and for uniformity in general is to suppose them results of evolution” (Peirce, CP 6.13). This remark is not a one-off in Peirce’s work. He tells us elsewhere that he has been “led to the hypothesis that the laws of the universe have been formed under a universal tendency of all things toward generalization and habit-taking” (Peirce, CP 7.515), which he argues is precisely such as to lend itself to

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evolutionary development over time. Peirce was unabashed in making this grand metaphysical hypothesis, and I don’t know of similar speculations on the part of other classical pragmatists, but the pressures Peirce is responding to in speculating about the explanation of the uniformity and systematicity of nature are, it seems clear to me, just those that drove Kant to the Ideas of Reason and Hegel to the Absolute.

39 But what a difference! In Peirce’s picture, things emerge from inexorable, natural processes, not from the plans or designs of some super-powerful intentional agent, and not from some divine but organic process that leaves us wondering where the original seed might have come from. Peirce’s view is not in any interesting sense an idealism, even though it preserves a great many of the features characteristic of German Idealism. But in Peirce’s version, these features are not accounted for by some top- down explanation that presupposes a grand unifier; they arise bottom-up from smaller, constrained, interactive processes filtered through . The unity arises from the process itself; it does not lie in any goal or final cause.

40 It is also revealing to recognize that the shift to evolution as the systematizer helps account for the emphasis on practice in pragmatism. The system of the world is not pre-ordained, either by God’s plans or by independent, pre-existing metaphysical : it must be created and realized in medias res, as it were, emerging in history from the simplest of beginnings and elaborating itself into the world and us, the knowers of that world. The pragmatic vision is a vision in which activity moves to the forefront in every case, for the world, like us humans, is busy making itself in the course of time. The pragmatist’s image of a self-constituting world containing self-constituting thinking capable of cognizing that world is not, in my view, all that different from the Hegelian view, but the historical and causal underpinnings at work in the processes of self-constitution are so very different.

41 I have argued that by the early XIXth century, idealism as a doctrine no longer stood in clear contrast to its nominal rivals, realism and materialism. But that does not mean that the terms and the contrasts between them became meaningless. There is a good sense and good reason to call Hegel an idealist; there is equally good sense and reason to deny that label to Peirce and Dewey, despite the fact that the larger structures of their views are deeply similar. There is a problem with such descriptions only when one loses sight of the complexity such simple terms often mask.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BUROKER Jill Vance, (1972), “Kant, the Dynamical Tradition, and the Role of Matter in Explanation,” PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Association, vol. 1972, 153-64.

COLVIN Stephen S., (1905), “Is Subjective Idealism a Necessary Point of View for ?,” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 2 (9), 225-31. doi:10.2307/2011704.

DEVRIES Willem A., (1991), “The of Teleology,” Philosophical Topics, 19 (2), 51-70.

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DEVRIES Willem A., (in press), “Hegel’s Pragmatism,” in M. Bykova & K. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel, London, Palgrave Macmillan.

DEWEY John, (1906), “Experience and Objective Idealism,” The Philosophical Review, 15 (5), 465-81. doi:10.2307/2177753.

HAACK Susan, (1976), “The Pragmatist Theory of Truth,” The British Journal for the , 27 (3), 231-49, [jstor.org/stable/686121].

HEGEL Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, (1969), Hegel’s Science of , transl. by A. V. Miller, , Humanities Press.

HEGEL Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, (1977), The Phenomenology of Spirit, transl. by A. V. Miller, Oxford, . (Cited by paragraph number.)

KANT Immanuel, (1998), Critique of Pure Reason, transl. by & Allen W. Wood, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. (References use the standard citation format, in which ‘A’ denotes the pagination in the first edition and ‘B’ the pagination in the second.)

KANT Immanuel, (1999), Correspondence, transl. and ed. by Arnulf Zweig, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

LOCKE John, (1975), An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. by P. H. Nidditch, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

PEIRCE Charles S., (1960), Collected Papers, 8 vols, ed. by C. Hartshorne & P. Weiss, Cambridge, MA, Press. (References are to volume number, then paragraph number.)

PLATO, (1921), Theaetetus. Sophist, transl. by Harold North Fowler, Loeb Classical 123, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

RYDER John, (1988), “Pragmatism as Idealism,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2 (4), 317-22.

WARREN Daniel, (2001), “Kant’s Dynamics,” in Eric Watkins (ed.), Kant and the Sciences, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 93-116.

NOTES

1. See for instance, Colvin 1905; Ryder 1988. Peirce himself tells us “the one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind” (CP 6.25). 2. The distinction I draw here might be similar to the distinction Dewey hints at in “Experience and Objective Idealism” between epistemologically-based and cosmologically-based idealisms. But Dewey doesn’t say enough to be sure of the extent to which our distinctions coincide. See Dewey 1906. 3. This characterization can often be found in the more popular references, such as the Encyclopaedia Brittanica or . See, e.g., [ britannica.com/topic/subjective-idealism]; [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_idealism]; [philosophynotes.net/philosophy/idealism/ idealism-forms-of-idealism-with-criticisms/132]. 4. Plato. The Sophist, cited by the traditional Stephanus . The in the Loeb Classical Library is “For I set up as a definition which defines being, that it is nothing else than power” (Plato 1921). 5. For instance “The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognizing that the finite has no veritable being” (SL 154; 5, 172). Of course, the full story in the case of Hegel – why

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self-realization is the mark of true being – is vastly more complex than this, but as a first approximation, we can live with this characterization. 6. I will just ignore the apparent separability of active reason for the moment. 7. See, for instance, Buroker 1972; Warren 2001. 8. Locke (1975, Bk. II, Ch. 23, §2). 9. deVries (in press). 10. “Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object”(Peirce, CP 5.402). 11. For a fuller view of Peirce’s realism, including its historical development, see Susan Haack (1976: 241): “Peirce frequently stresses that Reality is independent of human beliefs about it. Nonetheless, he manifests some embarrassment with his notion of Reality, since, as he is well aware, he can not prove that an external independent Reality exists. As he puts it: since he uses the idea of Reality as the foundation for his theory of inquiry, he cannot use that theory show that there is such a thing as Reality.” 12. For example, Peirce mentions that he “devoted two hours a day to the study of Kant’s Critic of Pure Reason for more than three years, until [he] almost knew the whole book by heart, and had critically examined every section of it” (CP 1.4). He also makes the explicit claims that (1) “My philosophy resuscitates Hegel, though in a strange costume” (CP 1.42), and (2) “I am a Schellingian, of some stripe” (CP 6.605). 13. But, of course there is a sense, and a perfectly good one, in which the world gets fitted to our minds – we are agents who seek to conform the world to our wishes (or at least our needs): that is the practical sphere. It is clear to me that, for the pragmatist, the practical sphere is finite and contained within a wider reality. We do not constitute reality altogether by means of our practical activity, but presuppose access to an already constituted reality within which we strive to achieve ourselves and our projects. Thus, I take it that there is no argument from a pragmatic view of our activity as agents to the claim that pragmatism is a form of idealism. 14. deVries (in press). 15. Letter to Marcus Herz, February 21, 1772. In Kant (1999: 133). 16. I have laid out my interpretation of Kant’s and Hegel’s differing approaches to teleology in deVries 1991.

ABSTRACTS

Pragmatism has ties to Idealism; it has even been accused of being a form of idealism. I tell a story about the changing nature of idealism that makes sense of its relationship to pragmatism without threatening to collapse the two. My story is a genealogy that begins well before pragmatism shows up. Pragmatism has very little in common with the subjective idealism of Berkeley or the problematic idealism of Descartes; the differences between idealism and pragmatism get blurred only because idealism underwent an evolution transforming it into something primed to influence and maybe bleed into pragmatism. It was, according to my story, the evolved idealism developed in Germany between 1781 and 1831 that contributed to the formation and development of pragmatism. Yet pragmatism is a large evolutionary step away from idealism, however much it retains and utilizes some of the strengths of late idealistic thought.

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AUTHOR

WILLEM A. DEVRIES

University of New Hampshire willem.devries[at]unh.edu

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Actuality and Intelligibility Hegel and Peirce on Experience Vis-à-Vis Reason

Vincent Colapietro

“The capital error of Hegel which permeates his whole system in every part of it is that he almost altogether ignores the Outward Clash.” (8.41)1 “The truth is that pragmaticism is closely allied to the Hegelian absolute idealism, from which however, it is sundered by its vigorous denial that the third category […] suffices to make the world, or is even so much as self-sufficient.” (“What Pragmatism Is” in [1905])2

1. Introduction

1 My aim is to compare two thinkers for the purpose of illuminating a topic both judged to be pivotal.3 That topic is the relationship between experience and reason. In the first main section after this Introduction, I will consider how Hegel no less than Peirce takes philosophy to be the offspring of experience, thereby showing how Hegel’s apparently overweening rationalism4 is intimately tied to an unabashed empiricism. In the next section, I will consider how close Hegel’s appreciation of doubt is to Peirce’s, contrasting their understanding with Descartes’s. In the third and final section, save for the Conclusion, I will highlight the commitment of these two thinkers to intelligibility. As fundamental as the appeal to experience is in each of their projects, their commitment to the intelligibility of nature, history, and humanity is no less fundamental. While in the Conclusion I will draw together my main conclusions and underscore several open questions, my task in this Introduction is threefold. I want to highlight the obstacles confronting anyone who desires to draw Hegel and Peirce together as closely as I am disposed to do, the philosophical and not just the historical importance of doing so, and finally the order in which I intend to treat this topic.5 I have already outlined this order, so what remains to be done in the Introduction concerns the obstacles facing us and the importance of our topic.

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2 At the outset of any comparison between G. W. F. Hegel and C. S. Peirce, various questions forcefully, almost violently, intrude themselves, not least of all two interpretive questions.6 To what extent did Peirce actually break with a priori modes of inquiry (cf. Short 2007)?7 To what extent is it accurate to take Hegel’s logic to be an a priori articulation of what any instance of saying, whatever counts as an intelligible utterance, minimally entails (cf. Bowman 2015)?

3 These hermeneutic questions immediately invite philosophical ones. What indeed does saying anything about anything minimally entail? For Hegel, who bears patient, painstaking witness in the Logic to the dialectical process, the answer is: nothing less than the as they unfold themselves in this monumental work. These categories are not subjective forms imposed upon a subject matter: they are rather immanent, if only implicit, in the Sache itself. For Peirce, the answer to this question demands nothing less than the categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness (see, e.g., 6.323-24) and especially the recursive of these distinct categories (see Savan 1987-88, Chapter II; also, Esposito 1980, Chapter VI, especially 179-94).8 Closely allied to these questions, there is another philosophical question: to what extent is it possible, in philosophy, to avoid a priori inquiry and to rely on a thoroughly experiential approach. if indeed it is at all possible?

4 Peirce’s philosophical genius no less than Hegel’s is bound up with his lifelong endeavor to articulate a categoreal scheme adequate to the multitudinous forms of human experience. In both cases, the derivation of the categories seems, at once, intimately connected to the contingencies of experiential compulsion and the necessities of purely formal rationality. Experience deprived of the power to overthrow the regnant forms of human cognition is only nominally experience. Reason incapable of plumbing the depths of experience is, likewise, only nominally reason. The name experience properly designates only what has the force to topple the seemingly most unassailable edifices of human thought, just as the word reason designates what possesses the capacity to anticipate the course of experience, but also to revise itself in light of the frustration of those anticipations.9 As much as thought is always an instance of reverie, it is at the same time an instance of working through the impasses and defeats to which it is brought by its own definitive demands. For neither Hegel nor Peirce is reason given at the outset, except in the most inchoate, implicit form. It is more than anything else an achievement and, as such, it emerges from experience, our confrontation with actuality. Philosophy, as an exemplification of rationality, one in which a relentless drive toward reflexive understanding (in a word, self-understanding) is a defining feature of this rational endeavor, provides a dramatic instance of reason springing from the womb of experience. Peirce’s guiding question, “How [do] things grow”? (7.267n8l; see also, EP 2: 373-4), is manifestly also Hegel’s. The salience of this question is, for these philosophers, equally pressing for understanding the cosmos and human reason as it undergoes dramatic transmutations in the course of striving to define its historical functions. Indeed, Hegel no less than Peirce evinces an appreciation of the role of experience in inaugurating, sustaining, and driving the growth of rationality. As paradoxical as this must sound to many readers, such growth is, at the same time, “a self-development of thought” (Peirce, 4.10).10

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2. Philosophy as the Offspring of Experience

5 In the judgment of both his immediate successors and, a generation or so later, the classical pragmatists, the dialectic of experience and reason did not culminate in ’s monumental achievement. As insightful and suggestive as his critical philosophy has proven to be, from his time to ours, an altogether adequate account in which the demands of reason and the disclosures of experience are harmoniously integrated cannot be found in Kant’s writings. From Fichte to Peirce and beyond, up to the present, critics of Kant have alleged unresolved tensions and fundamental occlusions in his ingenious endeavor to grant both experience and reason their due. In his writings, the a priori reason of the rationalists and the a posteriori facts of the empiricists were candidly acknowledged but not intimately allied. Moreover, the forms of thought were, by implication, static, inert, and external (see, e.g., Sedgewick 2010). His theoretical reconciliation falls short of doing adequate justice to the dynamic integration in our historical endeavors such as experimental science, political governance, and artistic creation of experiential compulsion and rational necessity or, at least, exigency.11 Finally, Kant’s categories, at least in the judgment of such critics as Hegel and Peirce, were invincibly subjective, rather than at once forms of thought and forms of being. As they appear in Kant’s system, they were, in effect, given apart from the actual history in which they assumed determinate shape (Sedgewick). The very consideration of their historicity was precluded by the constraints within which Kant was struggling to think through the question of the categories. As such, the forms of intelligibility were themselves unintelligible. Self-legislative reason, self-thinking thought, emerged from a matrix in which reason discovers itself to be, time and again, a heteronomous agent acting in behalf of an unacknowledged, or unsuspected, power, in which thinking comes to the realization that its autonomy is an achievement, and an invincibly precarious achievement. The autonomy of reason is rooted in a confrontation with otherness. This confrontation results in reason other than it has been, becoming to some extent its own other. On Hegel’s account and Peirce’s, heteronomy is not so much the opposite of autonomy as a condition for the attainment and refinement of whatever degree of self-governance a rational animal can obtain.

6 Even if it turns out that the a priori mode of inquiry cannot be avoided, the role of experience is hardly negligible or, in a sense, even secondary. Does not Hegel insist, “experience is the real author of growth and advance in philosophy” (1975: §12, p. 18)? There is unquestionably a sense in which primacy appears to be granted to experience when he claims, “philosophy is the child of experience, and owes its rise to a posteriori fact. As a matter of fact, thinking is always the negation of what we have immediately before us” (ibid.: §12, p. 17). Such claims obviously accord an importance to experience. One way of reading Hegel’s Logic, then, is to say that it presupposes nothing but “what we have immediately before us” at some chance moment (whatever this might be). In this instance, however, the a priori would seem to presuppose the a posteriori. Robert Stern supports this reading when he asserts: “[T]he only grounds for the sort of investigation carried out by the Logic into thought (which must therefore [thereafter?] be carried out presuppositionally insofar as thought is its object) is exactly the kind of ‘real doubt’ championed by the pragmatists at the expense of the ‘artificial doubt’ associated with Cartesianism” (Stern, 2011: 570). In fact, Hegel is emphatic about this:

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as Stern explains, “it is [from Hegel’s perspective] only when has been brought to a state of genuine despair [i.e., radical doubt] that it will be ready for the Logic, a despair the ‘shilly-shallying’ doubt of Descartes can never achieve […]” (ibid.).12 Textually, Hegel’s Logic presupposes his Phenomenology of Spirit. Methodologically and substantively, the work of elaborating a system of categories begins with the collapse of thought, a doubt so radical as to warrant being described as despair. The negativity constitutive of thought is however boundless and productive. It ceaselessly drives toward its own negation. In the process of negation, the shapes of consciousness or the forms of experience are negated but not utterly annihilated. They are inevitably preserved. In Hegel’s Logic, thought commences, ever again: the resurrection of thinking assumes a history of thought in which thinking has suffered defeat at its own hands.13 I will return to this crucial point in the next section.

7 On this account, the a priori is paradoxically posterior to the a posteriori. Pure thought is, of course, thought and, in turn, thought only emerges out of experience, above all, the experience of error. This is true for Hegel no less than Peirce.14 Thought as such emerges only out of a long, intricate history of countless, fundamental errors (errors so fundamental that their rejection thrusts us into nothing less than a different world than the one in which we were so much at home).15 The burden of exhibiting that history is the task of Hegel’s, though not Peirce’s, phenomenology. There is, accordingly, a sense in which Hegel’s Logic presupposes his Phenomenology and that sense encompasses the tangled history of error as a presupposition of a hyperformal science of logic (Zambrana 2015), i.e., the presuppositionless science of logic.

8 Thought as it emerges from this history is one thing; thought as it is in itself, namely apart from this history and all else, is another. In Peircean terms, thought as historically emergent is an instance of thirdness, while thought as it is, in itself, is a case of firstness. Thought, in the form of inquiry, emerges when beliefs break down and doubt seizes us. That is, the experience of error signals the birth of thought in this sense (Peirce, CP 7.345). What also complicates this account of thought as thirdness is, of course, that thought in itself is an instance of the firstness of thirdness, the qualitatively felt immediacy of mediation. With Hegel’s Phenomenology, we begin with thought (to use the language of Peirce’s categories) in its Secondness and, with his Logic, we move toward thought in its Firstness; then, in the culminating parts of his philosophical system (Naturphilosophie and Geistphilosophie), we move toward thought in its increasing Thirdness.16 In its culmination, we arrive at what Peirce would call the thirdness of thirdness (CP 5.121; also in EP 2: 197). “Reasonable reasonableness is Thirdness as Thirdness” (EP 2: 197), but such reasonableness is concrete.17 In processural terms, concreteness is to be understood (to borrow a term from Whitehead, but for a purpose not altogether his) in terms of concrescence, the process of growing ever more concrete, just as actuality is to be conceived as actualization. The German word Wirklichkeit no less than the English one actuality at least hint at a link with activity. The actual has the capacity to exert itself on what is other than itself. It in effect works on the densely sedimented results of an ongoing historical process. It unsettles sedimented patterns of thought and forms of life, opening paths to novel modes of thinking and of living. Forms of life no less than patterns of thought implode, since they prove in the course of history, under the pressure of experience, inadequate to both their defining aspirations and the actual conditions in which human striving alone amounts to anything significant and substantive. For our purpose, thinking is a process in which its failures generate the possibility of its resurrection from the ashes

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of self-immolation. The history of reason, be it in the form of Hegel’s dialectical notion of Vernunft or Peirce’s experimental conception of , is to a great extent a history of failure, frustration, and indeed humiliation.

9 Neither was a skeptic in the sense that he denied the very possibility of knowledge (far from it), but both were appreciative of what might be called the experience of skepticism, reason’s recurrent collapses and ensuing struggles to reclaim and revivify itself. That is, both are resolutely anti-skeptical philosophers who nonetheless take the disorienting experience of radical doubt with the utmost seriousness. While such doubt is far from what Descartes tried to produce by his adherence to a method of treating the dubious as though it were false, it is in a certain respect more radical than such methodic or make-believe doubt. Hegelian and Peircean doubt are rooted in a critical awareness of the epochal upheavals of historically generated doubts. These epochal upheavals provide the experiential matrices out of which rational thought, in its endeavor to secure an effective autonomy, endeavors to re-establish itself. Thinking always presupposes the experience of thinking and, thus, the experience of doubt in a radical sense, the sense in which agential disorientation is so profound that at the time of its dramatic appearance human rationality cannot be certain of a successful recovery.

3. Cartesian, Hegelian, and Peircean Doubt: Skepticism as Experience

10 The experience of error is truly an experience, that which we live through. Moreover, it profoundly alters the actual shape of human consciousness in the most concrete sense (experience as Erlebnis and Erfahrung).18 It might even be identified as what skepticism practically (or experientially) means. We are thrown into radical doubt, into seemingly invincible despair. So understood, skepticism is not a thesis we put forth or a stance we take, but an experience we live through. For all of their unbounded confidence in our cognitive capacities, both Hegel and Peirce are deeply appreciative of the significance of skepticism in this experiential sense. There is an important sense in which they have a deeper appreciation of such radical doubt than does the celebrated champion of methodic skepticism (see, e.g., Peirce, CP 6.498).

11 Of course, students of Peirce will be quick to point out that he was not a skeptic. And, in the textbook sense, he of course was not. Virtually all of these students however tend to draw an all too sharp distinction between his and skepticism. They are far from wrong in taking to distinguish Peirce’s fallibilism from virtually all forms of skepticism. In doing so, they are simply following Peirce’s emphatic rejection of universal doubt as a methodical principle. But something tends to get lost. Peirce’s attitude toward skepticism is possibly more nuanced than even his some of his most insightful expositors appreciate (e.g., Haack 1983; Hookway 1992; Potter 1985; and Short 2007). Given the relevance of our experience of doubt to the argument being presented here, it is crucial to highlight several of the ways in which his attitude is nuanced. Especially in reference to self-understanding, the tendency to set fallibilism and skepticism in stark opposition obfuscates what needs to be clarified – above all, how the experience of radical doubt plays a role in the constitution of reflexive comprehension.

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12 In certain respects, to repeat, Peirce’s fallibilism is closer to skepticism than even his most astute expositors appear to appreciate. It is unquestionably imperative to keep in mind his claim, “there is a world of difference between fallible knowledge and no knowledge” (1.37). It is equally important to take seriously his assertion, “if we have no immediate perception of a non-ego, [then] we can have no reason to admit the supposition of an existence so contrary to all experience as that would in that case be” (ibid.). Put otherwise (and less misleadingly), “we have direct experience of things in themselves” (6.95). Against modern rationalists and modern empiricists, against Locke no less than Descartes, hence, he asserts: “Nothing can be more completely false than that we experience only our own ideas” (ibid.).19 We directly (or “immediately”) experience reality. Any idea of what is absolutely other than what we experience or conceive would be beyond our power of conjecturing, were “absolute” or irreducible otherness not integral to our experience. We can imagine ourselves capable of framing an intelligible conception of unknowable things in themselves only because we have had the experience of reality rending asunder our most deeply entrenched convictions and beliefs. As it turns out, however, we are mistaken in this. What we imagine ourselves able to do cannot in principle be done, since it entails a contradiction. There is, indeed, a world of difference between imagining ourselves capable of framing such a conception and truly being able to frame one. Kant was convinced that we have the capacity to frame an intelligible conception of unknowable things in themselves, indeed, that there is no inherent obstacle to framing such a conception. Peirce was equally convinced that there is an inherent and hence invincible obstacle to doing so. As logicians, transcendental or otherwise, they profoundly disagreed about what is logically possible. As a result, they, as philosophers, equally disagreed about what is cognitively accessible to the human mind.

13 “There is nothing, then, to prevent our knowing,” Peirce insists, “outward things as they really are and it is most likely that we do thus know them in numberless cases” (5.311). But we can never be absolutely certain that we possess such knowledge in any specific case. Reversing what I take to be the Kantian presumption, Peirce is arguing that second-order knowledge is less secure and less certain than first-order knowledge. This is important for my argument. Descartes and Kant take first-order knowledge to be dependent on second-order knowledge, whereas Peirce does not.

14 Peirce does not hesitate to give radical doubt his utmost (if qualified) respect. After all, he writes, “scepticism about the reality of things, – provided it be genuine and sincere, and not a sham, – is a healthy and growing state of mental development” (8.43; emphasis added). Such skepticism is not a doctrine to be refuted, once and for all; it is rather an experience to be countenanced, time and again (cf. Alasdair MacIntyre 2006a). The formal refutation of a doctrine is one thing, the experiential defeat of our certainty quite another. As a doctrine, skepticism is, for those animated by the passionate desire to discover what they do not know, of little or no interest (cf. Ransdell 2000; also, Potter 1985). As an experience about the reality of things, however, genuine skepticism is an ineliminable part of human inquiry. No less than Hegel and MacIntyre, Peirce appreciated this. For finite, fallible, and arguably fallen20 beings such as we are, the pursuit of knowledge cannot but be a journey of despair, though one in which the Phoenix of hope arises from the ashes of its self-immolation.

15 At, or at least near, the center of Peirce’s vision, then, there is a recognition of our experience of our ignorance and errors. Nothing is, in my judgment, more central to his

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philosophy than his valorization of this experience. This is evident in his insistence: “The experience of ignorance, or of error, which we have, and which we gain by means of correcting our errors, or enlarging our knowledge [i.e., diminishing our ignorance], does enable us to experience and conceive something which is independent […]” (7.345; emphasis added).21 We have an experience of that which is independent of our finite minds (including any actual historical community) and, on the basis of this experience, we form a conception of reality as that which is independent of such thought (not thought in general, but thought insofar as it is finite). What is independent of finite mind is not independent of infinite mind. It is indeed relative to mind in the sense of an unbounded capacity able to transform itself into an ever more adequate means of grasping the actual disclosures of our evolving experience. Mind as given (or inherited) is however never fully adequate to reality as given in experience. In turn, reality as given in experience is itself never passively given. It actively elicits the creative activity of an evolving intelligence.

16 Peirce could not have had a stronger ally than Hegel in accrediting the experience, while rejecting the doctrine, of skepticism. At the center of their projections,22 there is an unblinking acknowledgment of the devastating power of radical doubt. The utter defeat of a definitive stance or determinate shape of human consciousness (e.g., Sense Certainty; or , Skepticism, or Unhappy Consciousness) results from the inadequacy of that stance in the face of determinate phenomena, that is, of compulsive experience23 (what Peirce was inclined to call the Outward Clash). Such a shape indeed implodes, from its own inherent inadequacy, but it does so as a result of what, in the course of experience, it must but cannot acknowledge. But what results is a determinate negation and, as a consequence of this, a more adequate understanding is attained. This positive aspect of immanent critique needs to be appreciated no less than its destructive facet.24 Such adequacy is predominantly a retrospective judgment; in contrast, the abiding sense that even our greatest cognitive achievements are corrigible moments in an ongoing process points to the prospective character of experimental inquiry as an historical practice (i.e., an evolved and evolving endeavor).

17 For both thinkers, then, thought emerges in response to what is encountered in experience and what is so encountered is not to be located in consciousness (or the self), not even in the dialogue between self and other, but in the process wherein alterity and reflexivity, (more simply) other and self emerge and evolve in an open- ended manner. So, Peirce, referring to Hegel’s Logic, desires, as Hegel does, readers who are not “impressed by the more tangible, wooden, and dead ideas, – or corpses of ideas, – rather than by the more elusive, fluid, and living ones” (7.642). “Remembering […] that philosophy is a science based upon everyday experience, we must,” Peirce advises, “not fall into the absurdity of setting down as a datum and starting-point of philosophy any abstract and simple idea, as Hegel did when he began his logic with pure Being” (8.112; Review of Royce’s The World & the Individual, c. 1900). In philosophy, our point of departure ought to be not specifically an abstract and simple idea (say, the idea of Being, i.e., pure being), but virtually any concrete and complex one. This criticism of Hegel is however immediately followed by an endorsement: “we must set out from ideas familiar and complex, as Hegel began his greater masterpiece by considering a man sitting under a tree in a garden in the afternoon” (ibid., emphasis added). We must begin with finite minds entangled in the actual circumstances of their precarious lives, though the quiet moment of a sitting safely in pastoral seclusion is admittedly one in which the precarious character of human life is hardly prominent. “We must not

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begin by talking of pure ideas, – vagabond thoughts that tramp the public roads without any human habitation, – but [we] must begin with men and their conversations” (1.112; emphasis added). Philosophical inquiry grows out of commonplace experience and, as it turns out, the experience of utterance (hence, the phenomenon of articulation) is especially salient to the work of the . “We are familiar with the phenomenon of a man’s expressing an opinion, sometimes decidedly, often otherwise. Perhaps it will be a mere suggestion, a mere question” (ibid.). Not the a priori idea of pure Being, but rather the inescapably familiar phenomenon of expression, constitutes the beginning of philosophical thought deliberately striving to assume radical responsibility for its own fateful development. In Peirce’s judgment, then, Hegel’s logic, as the discipline in which the long list of the most fundamental categories are displayed in their dialectical necessity, actually begins with the experientially familiar phenomenon of expression, in any of its modes (even that of “a mere question,” perhaps especially that of an urgently felt interrogative).25 “We learn by experience,” as Hegel himself so tellingly observes in the Preface to PhG (A. V. Miller translation), “that we meant something other than we meant to mean; and this correction of our meaning compels our knowing to go back to the proposition, and understand it in some other way” (1977: 39).26

18 The meaning of being is inseparable from the being of meaning, that is, from the being of signs, as they are concretely embodied in (say) human expression, hence as they are inadequately present in any actual instance. This is what I am inclined to call Peirce’s master , though it rarely is cast in the form of an argumentation. It is however frequently encountered in his writings as an “argument” (thus, as an enthymeme in which the form of the argument is more or less unstated). One iteration of this argument is this argument runs as follows: The mode of being of the composition of thought […] is the living intelligence which is the creator of all intelligible reality, as well as knowledge of such reality. It is the entelechy, or perfection of being. (6.341) So, then, there are these three modes of being: first, the being of a , in itself, unattached to any subject, a possibility floating in vacuo, not rational yet capable of rationalization; secondly, there is the being that consists in arbitrary brute action upon other things, not only irrational but anti-rational, since to rationalize it would be to destroy its being;27 and thirdly, there is living intelligence from which all reality and all power are derived, which is rational necessity and necessitation. (6.342; emphasis added)

19 If Secondness is taken completely by itself, hence utterly apart from Thirdness, it would be entirely stripped of what Hegel calls the ideality of finitude (see Lesser Logic). And this would result in rendering things, finite things in their brute interactions, ultimately unintelligible. But Peirce is no less an advocate of intelligibility than Hegel. Does he not equate being with cognizability?

20 In an intriguing passage, Peirce compares his speculative rhetoric to Hegel’s objective logic (see Fisch 1986; Kent 1977). The point of the comparison appears to be that, in both cases, the finite thinker is not arranging distinct categories in an intelligible sequence but rather such a thinker is tracing out the movement of thought itself as thoughts unfold themselves according to an immanent logic. Note first, however, that for Peirce the third and culminating branch of logic is “the highest and most living branch” (2.333), the one wherein if anyone is unduly impressed by

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[…] the more tangible, wooden, and dead ideas, – or corpses of ideas, – rather than by the more elusive, fluid, and living ones, my principal care will be to correct such notions. (7.642)

21 Much like Hegel, then, fluid and living ideas, not static and dead ones, are the focus of Peirce’s concern. “With Speculative Rhetoric, Logic, in the sense of Normative Semeiotic, is,” Peirce claims, “brought to a close” (2.111). But the discipline with which Peirce’s logic culminates is, in his judgment, apparently akin to that with which Hegel’s system commences, as he makes immediately clear. But now we have to examine whether there be a doctrine of signs corresponding to Hegel’s objective logic; that is to say, whether there be a life in Signs, so that – the requisite being present – they will go through a certain order of development, and if so, whether this development be merely of such a nature that the same round of changes of form is described over and over again whatever be the matter of the thought or whether, in addition to such a repetitive order, there be also a greater life-history that every symbol furnished with a vehicle of life goes through, and what is the nature of it. There are minds who will pooh-pooh an idea of this sort, much as they would pooh-pooh a theory involving fairies. I have no objection to the pooh-pooh-ing of fairies, provided it be critical pooh-pooh-ing; but I wish I had the leisure to place before those gentlemen a work to be entitled The History of Pooh-pooh-ing. I think it would do them good; and make room in their minds for an essay upon the Logic of Pooh-pooh-ing. (2.111)

22 The claims of both thinkers have been pooh-poohed, but they have a way of winning, time and again, the critical of responsible philosophers, so their facile dismissal seems to be an intellectual injustice. When competent inquirers genuinely disagree, real doubt is present.

4. An Unabashed Commitment to Unbounded Intelligibility

23 Hegel identifies philosophy with idealism in one fundamental sense of this ambiguous term. In this sense, idealism is not one among other approaches to philosophy. It is philosophy. Accordingly, to abandon the principle of idealism involves nothing less than destroying philosophy itself.28 While the empiricist might be content to take the actual world to be at bottom a brute fact, simply to be accepted in its opacity, the idealist in its most basic Hegelian sense cannot do so. For finite minds, there may be absolutely inexplicable facts but the universe (or totality of things) is to some extent a cosmos and, in turn, this cosmos is not itself such a brute or inexplicable fact. It is intelligible and, as it turns out, it is intelligible because it is self-luminous. In all of its defining facets (e.g., nature and the life of “mind” or Geist) reality renders itself intelligible by its own inherent drive toward ever more adequate articulation of what it actually is (and what it actually is, because actually means finitely, must be seen as what it inadequately is).29 Finite actuality (cf. Miller; Colapietro 2003) is unintelligible apart from infinite ideality. This is as much (if not more) an ontological claim as it is an epistemological one. On this account, finite actuality, often taken to be the most concrete form of reality, is ontologically deficient. It is indeed an impoverished mode of being, because it is an utterly dependent mode. That which is self-dependent and that which is self-explanatory are one and the same. Finite actuality depends on what is other than itself: its actuality is inseparably tied to its finitude and the finitude of anything is the result of that thing being determined by the limits imposed on it by

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other finite beings. Finite actuality is, thus, definition by others. Beyond this, it depends on an infinite network of irreducible otherness. To make sense out of any concrete instance of finite actuality (e.g., a species of animals or a form of governance), we need to situate it in a context, that is, a network of relationships in which what the thing is can only be ascertained by reference to what is other than that thing (say, in the case of a species of animals, the environment and other species).

24 On at least some occasions, the cosmos certainly confronts us as that which transcends our understanding, yet contains countless and seductive intimations of intelligibility. It is often felt to be our home, a habitat in which our being, including our being here, is not an anomaly). This is central to Hegel and Peirce’s vision. But being exiled from one habitat after another is no less central to their account of our relationship to the world. 30

25 Hegel was in some respects quite unfair to any number of his predecessors, not least of all Kant, while Peirce was in important respects unjust to some of his predecessors, above all Hegel.31 Hegel hardly ignored the Outward Clash. Of greater importance, he (as it were) attended with greater care than did Peirce himself to the complex relationship between Secondness and Thirdness as defining features of the Outward Clash.32 More fully, Hegel attended with more painstaking care than Peirce to both genuine and degenerate Secondness as well as to the three forms of Thirdness (the two degenerate modes and the genuine one). While a degenerate form of Secondness, the clash of one categoreal framework with another is hardly an unimportant or negligible phenomenon. The clash exemplified by the familiar phenomena in which truly genuine Secondness is predominant is indeed one in which the secondness exhibits its force and brutality against the backdrop of Thirdness. Take one of Peirce’s favorite examples of genuine Secondness (one is struck violently in the back of the head as one is walking down a street). The physical blow is, in this illustration, tied to its utter unexpectedness and, of course, expectation is an instance of Thirdness. There is, to be sure, the physical blow in its purely brute force (a of genuine Secondness). But the example betrays how, in our experience, Secondness is tied to Thirdness, how rupture is linked to continuity. We and, indeed “all things […] swim in continua” (Peirce, CP 1.171), including in the objective continua of space and time (or that of space-time). The unconscious expectation of moving safely through the world is shattered in the experience of unanticipated .

26 The completely unexpected frustration of a largely unconscious is a phenomenon in which the Secondness is experienced as startling and disconcerting, precisely because we had no inkling of anything about to oppose our exertions. While this is true in all contexts of our endeavors, it is dramatically evident in social and political contexts. Also in the , anomalies arise and, in the course of that history, they often gather strength and salience, so much so that they eventually prompt a revision, perhaps a radical revision, of the regnant framework of scientific explanation (cf. Kuhn 2012). The experiential clash of this framework with this or that aspect of the world, as this or that aspect so forcefully asserts itself in experience, tends to generate an agon between rival frameworks (e.g., the Ptolemaic and the Copernican or the Newtonian and the Einsteinian). And, in the history of such conflicts, more adequate frameworks emerge, ones incorporating the insights of their rivals while avoiding the limitations and distortions of these alterative schemes. Though I am far from confident that this is the case, the clash of one framework with another might be

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taken as an instance of the Secondness of Thirdness (however degenerate an instance of such Secondness). In turn, the overcoming of this opposition might be taken as the Thirdness of Thirdness. (The almost wholly implicit but deeply felt sense of intelligibility by which we move through the world might, finally, be taken as the Firstness of Thirdness.)

27 Of course, there is great danger and indeed inevitable distortions whenever we translate one thinker into the categories of another. But, as a result of our attempts at such translation, there can also be insight and illumination. Just as something inevitably is lost in translation, other things might be gained. Accordingly, I formally propose to do what I have actually been doing just now – translating facets of Hegel’s project into Peirce’s categories.

28 What, then, is my provisional conclusion? Far from being a just criticism of Hegel, Peirce’s repeated charge that his predecessor overlooked the Outward Clash borders on philosophical slander. After all, does not Hegel insist, the Absolute “contains within itself the highest degree of opposition” (SL 824; WL 6: 548; quoted by Zambrana 2010: 212)?33 A careful reader of Hegel’s often obscure writings can only conclude that nothing is more central to his philosophical project than inescapable, irreducible conflict, operating at various levels (including the experiential level of direct conflict between consciousness and what it encounters) and assuming distinct guises. The question of whether these conflicts are truly irreducible is, however, a fair and important one. There is, in my judgment a warrant, for taking Hegel to be close to Peirce on this point.

29 In sum, Hegel did not ignore the Outward Clash between the finite mind and the experiential world in which the concrete actualization of any finite mind takes place. Much like Peirce, he situated this clash in a broader context in order to render it more fully intelligible. He carefully attended to the various aspects of irreducible, but (in a sense) not invincible opposition (or Secondness). What Peirce would call actuality, in itself, is not only unintelligible but also anti-intelligible. Actual things and events, as familiar, complex phenomena of universal human experience, are, however, not pure seconds: they are shot through with Thirdness. This implies that these objects and occurrences are bound up with ideality, infinity, and history (history is the scene in which the Thirdness of Thirdness might yet triumph, in a more adequate and hence less violent form than anything yet realized).

30 What unites Hegel and Peirce is, above all else, a robust commitment to unbounded intelligibility. Inseparably connected to this, their kinship is nowhere deeper than in their subtle, nuanced, painstaking accounts of the complex interplay among immediacy, opposition, and mediation. For our purpose, at least on this occasion, the interplay between opposition and mediation needs to be thrust into the foreground. For the most part, we must let Firstness go unexplored, while attending to Secondness and Thirdness in their interplay. Peirce was brilliant in bringing certain facets of this interplay into sharpest focus. But Hegel was, at least, equally brilliant in exhibiting not only the centrality of fateful conflict but also just how the conflict of rival frameworks is the driving force of human history. What is however easy to miss is that these frameworks are inseparable from the worlds in which they emerge. The medieval outlook is, for example, one with the medieval world. It makes sense only in that world, though ultimately it cannot make sense of that world and, as a result, it drives toward its own transcendence. But this is because, given its defining contradictions, that world

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drives toward its own dissolution. It becomes far more intelligible after its dissolution than during its duration.

31 But Hegel no less than Peirce is a midwife, assisting the birth of a world struggling to emerge from the womb of history. The dramatic birth of such a world is always a novel bid for intelligibility. It is an attempt to make wider, deeper sense out of the world than has ever yet been achieved. It involves summing up the past, for the purposes of the present, and inaugurating the present, for the possibility of a future beyond anything yet imagined. There is no better example of the Thirdness of Thirdness than the birth of a world in which the self-luminosity of the world manifests itself to rational agents, hence a world in which the artistic, philosophical, and religiousness consciousness of such agents actualizes itself in the evolved and indeed evolving forms of concrete reasonableness (e.g., artworks, modes of worship, and forms of explanation). Concrete reasonableness is concrete by virtue of being embodied and it is embodied, first and foremost, in the habits and artifacts of rational agents in the actual circumstances of their historical time (CP 6.476).

32 Philosophy is an attempt to come to adequate terms with the actual world in its irreducibly concreteness, to comprehend as fully and finely as possible the concrete, infinite totality in which finite, fallible minds are rooted (hence, the totality out of which such minds not only grow in their inherited forms but also evolve toward ever novel ones). No appeal to immediacy can instantly secure concreteness; no such appeal or sequence of such appeals can do much, if anything, to render thought concrete. An intricate process of reflexive mediation alone can render philosophy concrete. Hegel’s dialectical approach and Peirce’s pragmaticist orientation are thus allied in their shared aspiration – to render reason concrete, more concrete than it has proven itself to be up to this point. But this involves participating in historical processes and shared practices. That is by standing apart from the world we do not render it rational, and thereby intelligible; rather the world itself in its irrepressible tendencies and undying restlessness renders itself rational and, insofar as we participate thoughtfully in the processes and practices by which this is accomplished, we render ourselves more concretely reasonable. Of course, we can no more conceive ourselves apart from the world than we can conceive the world apart from the possibility of beings who are in principle capable of knowing it. Both Hegel and Peirce unabashedly affirm the of the categories, without denying their status as integral features of cognitive agents. The world renders itself rational and intelligible through agents such as us, while we render ourselves human and actual through an ongoing process of radical self-alteration.

33 There is no Thirdness without Secondness. There is in principle Secondness without Thirdness, but there is in practice hardly a trace of Secondness utterly apart from Thirdness. One irony is that Hegel was in effect endeavoring to grasp not pure Secondness but Secondness in its complex relationships to Thirdness, the degenerate and genuine forms of Secondness in conjunction with the degenerate forms of Thirdness but above all the genuine form (i.e., the Thirdness of Thirdness). He appreciated not only the outward clash between self and other but also the various levels and forms of agon in and through which older forms of intelligibility implode and, out of the ruins, newer forms are assembled. So, far from ignoring Secondness, Hegel makes it central to his project, at least as central as Peirce makes it to his. “And this notion, of being such as other things make them, is,” Peirce suggests, “such a

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prominent feature of our life that we conceive other things also to exist by virtue of their reactions against each other. The idea of other, of not, becomes a very pivot of thought” (1.324; cf. Bowman 2015). It is a notion around which arguably everything turns. The actual determinations resulting from such finite actuality (finite beings acquiring differential form in their drive to crowd out a place for themselves in the actual world) must be a central part of any adequate story of the enveloping universe. But, by itself, it is, for Hegel and Peirce, inadequate. The ideality of finitude, the infinity of ideality, and finally the actualization of ideality (insofar as this is possible) in natural and historical processes need to be invoked in order to show how the self-luminous intelligibility of a self-evolving universe is not a fanciful idea but at least a reasonable conjecture. Whether it is more than this, in particular, whether it is a dialectical necessity, cannot be considered on this occasion. Substantively, Hegel and Peirce are making equally strong claims. Methodologically, however, Peirce is making a much weaker one than Hegel. His claim about such intelligibility is avowedly nothing more than a guess, albeit one for which rather strong arguments may be made. But, in the end, it remains a guess. It is a might, rather than a must, be. Thus, the very point where Hegel’s thought and Peirce’s so dramatically converge is the point where one of their most fundamental differences comes into sharpest focus. Dialectical necessity stands in marked contrast to possibility. But note that this difference is, for the most part, not the one underscored by Peirce, though he did occasionally try to distinguish himself from Hegel in terms of necessity.

5. Conclusion

34 Let me conclude as I began – with several questions. To what extent can Peirce’s conception of experimental intelligence be made compatible with Hegel’s notion of dialectical reason? Does Hegel’s understanding of dialectical necessity truly stand opposed to Peirce’s conception of what would take place (an outcome he does not hesitate to describe as destined)? Is the kind of necessity on which Hegel insisted opposed to the freedom that Peirce and indeed the other pragmatists, especially James, were so anxious to safeguard?34 For the most part, the importance of a philosopher is, contra Peirce, not what significant truth that individual has proven,35 but rather what questions they have shown to be pivotal. The very importance of their questions however can only be ascertained by juxtaposing them with other questions in some respects overlapping while in other respects divergent. One of the most illuminating ways to do this is to draw subtle, suggestive, and systematic thinkers, who are above all defined by their questions, into dialogue with one another. G. W. F. Hegel and C. S. Peirce lend themselves to being juxtaposed in this manner.36 When we do so, the secondness of thirdness, the clash of ideals of intelligibility, will result.

35 The clash between them is, however, not nearly as simple or straightforward as Peirce imagined. Above it, it is not reducible to Hegel’s “trifling” failure to appreciate the Outward Clash. But, then, Peirce’s pragmaticism might assist Hegel’s idealism in becoming a more truly living logic in which the ineliminable agon of rational ideals works itself out in the minute details and overarching aspirations of human history. The portrait of either Hegel’s vision of dialectic reason or Peirce’s conception of experimental intelligence can only be drawn in explicit, detailed reference to the seemingly contingent events of an ongoing history. We discover at the center of this

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history not only the often violent clash of rival ideals but also the inevitable inadequacy of even the most powerful forms of human conceptualization to do justice to the unanticipated demands of our ineluctable experience.

36 The writings of G. W. F. Hegel and C. S. Peirce are sites in which such clashes are dramatically displayed and such inadequacies are tellingly revealed. Beyond this, they provide resources for understanding the drama of thought rescuing itself from the darkness of despair. Finally, these writings throw us toward the future in a manner in which our distance from, yet entanglement with, the past is a defining feature of the dramatic present.37 In other words, these two philosophers are nothing less than dramatists of reason’s self-renewals and self-revisions (cf. MacIntyre 2006a). Whatever differences divide them (and these differences are numerous and deep), this kinship conjoins them. Peirce sensed this kinship38 even if he tended to place mistaken emphasis on the most telling difference between himself and Hegel. The clash between them does not so much concern the outward clash between experience and reason39 as that between somewhat different visions of the intricate relationship between rational ideals and experiential compulsion. Exploring the relationship between Hegel and Peirce can be an invaluable aid in illuminating the relationship between reason and experience. My modest hope is to have rendered in this essay a bold claim somewhat plausible. With each of these thinkers, one is thrown back anew on the most fundamental questions and forced to think over them, once again. The question of the relationship between experience and reason is one such question. The positions to which Hegel and Peirce were driven by their unblinking confrontation with the dramatic disclosures of ineluctable experience and also by their unabashed commitment to unbounded intelligibility provide more than an optimal basis of philosophical comparison. They provide insights into the matter at hand.40

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ZAMBRANA Rocío, (2015), Hegel’s Theory of Intelligibility, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

NOTES

1. “Dr. Royce and his school, I am well aware,” Peirce stresses, “consider to be radically vicious; so that we unhappily cannot carry them along with us. (They often deny this, by the way, and say they rest entirely on experience. This is because they so overlook the Outward Clash, that they do not know what experience is. They are like , who after stating in eloquent terms that all knowledge comes from experience, goes on to mention spiritual illumination from on high as one of the most valuable kinds of .) But they will not succeed in exploding the method of modern science […]” (8.43). 2. “My whole method will be found,” Peirce at one point declared, “to be in profound contrast with that of Hegel; I reject his philosophy in toto. Nevertheless, I have a certain sympathy with it, and fancy that if its author had only noticed a very few circumstances he would himself have been led to revolutionize his system. One of these is the double division or dichotomy of the second idea of the triad. He has usually overlooked external Secondness, altogether. In other words, he has committed the trifling oversight of forgetting that there is a real world with real actions and reactions. Rather a serious oversight that” (1.368). 3. “The most familiar instances of the mental process known as Comparison seem, at first sight, to consist,” (1968: 170) observes, “of a consciousness of certain familiar dyadic relations – relations of similarity and difference. Red contrasts with green; sound breaks in upon silence; one sensory quality collides […] with another.” This however is deceiving. The Hegelian Royce draws explicitly upon the pragmaticist Peirce to make his point: “Now Peirce’s view of the nature of comparison depends upon noticing that, familiar as such of similarity and dissimilarity may be, no one of them constitutes the whole of any complete act of comparison. Comparison, in the fuller sense of the word, takes place when one asks or answers the question: ‘What constitutes the difference between A and B?’ ‘Wherein does A resemble B?’ ‘Wherein consists their distinction?’” (Ibid.: 171). The basis or ground of the comparison (to use one of Royce’s own examples) between, say, Shakespeare and Dante (ibid.: 176-7) delimits the scope of the comparison and, thereby, enhances the possibility of the juxtaposition being instructive or illuminating. It is noteworthy that, in this context, Royce goes on to claim: “Peirce’s theory of comparison, and of the mediating idea or ‘third’ which interprets, is, historically speaking, a theory not derived from Hegel, by whom at the time he wrote these early logical papers [“On a New List of Categories” and the cognition series in JSP], Peirce had been in no notable way influenced” (ibid.: 185; cf. Fisch, 1986: 261). Royce makes bold to assert: “Peirce’s conception of interpretation [or, even more broadly, semiosis, i.e., sign-activity] defines an extremely general process, of which the Hegelian dialectical triadic process is a very special case” (ibid.: 185). This essay is nothing less than an exemplification of the process to which the logician Peirce and the dialectician Hegel sought to exhibit in its most abstract form and to illustrate in its concrete instances. It is, for both Hegel and Peirce, a process in which the “idea of other, of not, becomes the very pivot of thought” (1.324). Peirce however missed the extent to which irreducible otherness played, for Hegel no less than for himself, this pivotal role. Such, at least, is what I want to show in this essay. 4. Cf. James (1977: 48-9). 5. In his Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, Saint Thomas Aquinas (1951) writes: “In the present treatise on the soul we find, first, an Introduction: in which the author does the three things that should be done in any Introduction. For in writing an Introduction one has three objects in view: first, to gain the reader’s good will; secondly, to dispose him to learn; thirdly, to win his attention. The first object one achieves by showing the reader the value of the knowledge in

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question; the second by explaining the plan and divisions of the treatise; the third by warning him of its difficulties.” 6. Everything is similar to everything else, in some respect. Hence, pointing out similarities between even very different thinkers does not involve great or insight. What we might call the of comparison needs above all to be borne in mind: What is the purpose of drawing any specific comparison? In order to honor the spirit of these two philosophers, our purpose ought to be philosophical: it should concern some important methodological or substantive issue. I have tried to do just this in my efforts here to draw a comparison between Hegel and Peirce, for my principal purpose is becoming clearer about the relationship between experience and reason. My secondary one is becoming clearer about the relationship between Hegel and Peirce. In philosophically dealing with philosophers, hermeneutic and historical questions must ultimately be subordinated to strictly philosophical ones. 7. While I take Peirce to be a radical experimentalist, there are passages in his writings, especially pertaining to his derivation of categories, that seem to be instances of a priori reasoning. For the most part, these texts however can be rendered consistent with his experimentalism and, hence, are not what they seem (evidence of recourse to a priori reasoning. Even so, they give the appearance that he was guilty of what he condemned in others. 8. Joseph Esposito rightfully points to the importance of Peirce’s “The Logic of : An Attempt to Develop My Categories from Within” (Esposito, 1980: 179ff.). It is significant that he discusses this text in a chapter entitled “Objective Logic,” thereby underscoring the affinity between Peirce’s attempt to develop his categories in this manner and Hegel’s Logic. 9. In his Novum Organon, (2000) highlights the way we anticipate experience and, in his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant (1933) modifies this notion for his purpose. 10. “The highest symbol is,” Peirce insists, “one which signifies a growth, or self-development, of thought, and it is of that alone that a moving representation is possible” (4.9; see 5.). He adds: “A fallacy is, for me, a supposititious thinking, a thinking that parades as a self-development of thought but it is in fact begotten by some other sire than reason. […] For reasoning ceases to be Reason when it is no longer reasonable: thinking ceases to be Thought when true thought disowns it. A self-development of Thought takes the course that thinking will take that is sufficiently deliberate, and is not truly a self-development if it slips from being the thought of one object-thought to being the thought of another object-thought. It is, in a geological sense, a ‘fault’ – and unconformability in the strata of thinking” (4.10). 11. The demands and interests of reason need to be taken as seriously as the disclosures and compulsions of experience. 12. It is certainly ironic that the “rationale for Hegel’s presuppositionless inquiry is thus one with which the pragmatist can safely sympathize” (ibid.), since the sort of logic championed in Hegel’s Logic was so suspect in the judgment of the classical pragmatists and, inseparably connected to this, the philosophical ideal of a presuppositionless inquiry was no less dubious. But what softens this apparent opposition is just the crucial point being stressed here: Hegel’s science of pure thought presupposes the experience of heuristic despair (or radical doubt). 13. “The hand that inflicts the wound is,” Hegel claims, “also the hand which heals it” (Lesser Logic, 1975: 43). 14. Here, too, it is instructive to consult Stern’s “Hegel and Pragmatism.” 15. It is ironic that James, even though he found Hegel’s overarching even more unacceptable than did Peirce, appreciated the extent to which Hegel acknowledged – indeed, highlighted – the centrality of what Peirce would call secondness, in conjunction with what Hegel christens negation. “There is,” James himself emphasizes in A Pluralistic Universe, “a dialectical movement in things, if such it please you to call it.” What Hegelian or monistic rationalism highlights is also what pluralistic empiricism highlights: “everything is in an environment,” there is “a surrounding world of other things, and […] if you leave it to work there [in that world]

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it will inevitably meet with friction and opposition from its neighbors. Its rivals and enemies will destroy it unless it can buy them off by compromising some part of its original pretensions” (James, 1977: 45). 16. Quite apart from thought, this is often the sequence in which Peirce begins his presentation of the categories. That is, he begins with secondness and then moves to firstness and, finally, to thirdness. 17. This roughly – but only roughly – corresponds to Hegel’s much misunderstood notion of Absolute Knowledge. 18. In this sense, consciousness is not anything invincibly inner, private, or subjective. It is embodied in institutions, practices, and discourses. 19. An interesting question, though one I cannot pursue here, is how Peirce’s critique of Cartesian rationalism and Lockean empiricism are related to Kant’s “Refutation of Idealism.” There can be no question that his early engagement with Kant equipped him with motives and resources to carry out this critique. But there is hardly any less question that he, perhaps quite early in his intellectual life, moved beyond Kant and toward Hegel. While Kant’s refutation reinscribes the dualisms Hegel and Peirce were contesting, their own intensely critical approach to Kant’s “critical philosophy” makes of his “Refutation of Idealism” only a waystation on a journey landing them quite far from Königsberg. 20. “Most of us, such is the depravity of the human heart,” Peirce claims in one place, “look askance at the notion that ideas have any [inherent] power; although some power they have we cannot but admit” (2.149). In another place, he observes: “It is astonishing how human minds seem naturally to pervert the interrelations of these three categories of fact. The triadic fact takes place in thought. I do not say in anybody’s thinking [i.e., necessarily in any finite mind’s cogitation], but in pure abstract thought; while the dyadic thought is existential. With that comparison plainly before them, our minds perversely regard the dyadic fact [or secondness] as superior in reality to the ‘mere’ relation of thought which is the triadic fact [or thirdness]. We forget that thinking implies existential action [i.e., that thirdness is inseparable from secondness], though it does not consist in that […]” (6.324; emphasis added). Such passages suggest to me that humans are not only finite and fallible but also (in a sense) “fallen.” 21. The experience of error and ignorance is itself gained by our efforts to diminish our ignorance or correct our errors. This is a somewhat subtle point. Experience (at least our experience of our ignorance and errors) is, in a sense, not simply had (cf. on experience as had versus known). We come to have this experience as a result of our efforts to counteract the disclosure, often quite painful, of these limitations and defects. Closer to Kant and Hegel, more distant from Locke and Hume, Peirce stresses the active role of human agents in the very constitution of even those experiences in which what is other than the self forces itself brutally upon the self. To recall Hegel’s brilliant insight, the fear of truth, masquerading as the fear of error, needs to be exposed for what it is. Peirce would pragmatically clarify the fear of truth to be at bottom the fear of experience, specifically the power of experience to force us to transform, on occasion even profoundly, our understanding of, and our relationship to, the world. 22. In the chapter in A Pluralistic Universe devoted to Hegel, famously wrote: “Any author is easy if you can catch the centre of his vision.” Specifically regarding Hegel, he proposes a twofold vision. “The first part is,” James suggests,” “that reason is all-inclusive, the second was that things are ‘dialectical’” (James, 1977: 164). 23. This expression is, of course, pleonastic, at least from Peirce’s perspective. Experience is by its very nature compulsive. 24. For alerting me to my tendency to allow the destructive facet to eclipse the positive one, I am indebted to Paul Giladi. Indeed, he has offered many helpful comments and suggestions, too many to explicitly acknowledge.

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25. In “The Sentiment of Rationality” in The Will to Believe (1956), William James asserts: “The germinal question concerning things brought for the first time before consciousness is not the theoretic ‘What is that?’ but the practical ‘Who goes there?’ or rather […] ‘What is to be done’” (ibid.: 84). My suggestion is that thought emerges first and foremost in the form of a question, not a statement or imperative. 26. In Ballie’s translation, this is rendered: “The common view discovers that the statement is intended in another sense than it is thinking of, and this correction of its opinion compels knowledge to go back to the proposition and take it now in some other sense” (Hegel, 1967: 122). Note, regardless of translation: we are compelled to revise the meaning and, in our effort to do so, we are compelled to go back to our original stance (“the proposition”) and modify it so that it more adequately accords with what we mean, fully considered. 27. It is almost certainly the case that Peirce judges Hegel to have rationalized Secondness and, hence, to have destroyed it. But he himself considers Secondness in conjunction with Thirdness, underscoring the crucial role played by arbitrary force in the continuous growth of concrete reasonableness. Moreover, he insists, “there is Thirdness in experience, an element of Reasonableness to which we can train our reason to conform more and more” ( EP 2: 212; emphasis added). While human experience is a phenomenon in which brute compulsion is the predominant element, immanent reasonableness is also characteristic of this complex phenomenon. Thus, it is far from clear wherein lies the difference between Peirce and Hegel regarding Secondness in its irreducibility. Also, Peirce’s concluding emphasis on “rational necessity and necessitation,” in 6.342, make it hard to see how his position deviates fundamentally from Hegel’s (the latter being accused of necessitarianism). 28. It is worth recalling in full a passage from Hegel’s Logic. It makes clear not only his identification of philosophy with idealism but also that an embrace of finitude (an acknowledgment of actuality) does not preclude a thoroughgoing commitment to infinity, properly understood. “The proposition that the finite is ideal constitutes idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognizing that the finite has no veritable being. Every philosophy is essentially an idealism, or at least has idealism for its principle, and the question then is how far this principle is actually carried out. This is as true of philosophy as of ; for religion equally does not recognize finitude as a veritable being, as something ultimate and absolute or as something underived, uncreated, eternal. Consequently, the opposition of idealistic and realistic philosophy has no significance. A philosophy which ascribed veritable, ultimate, absolute being to finite existences as such, would not deserve the name of philosophy; the principles of ancient or modern , water, or matter, or atoms are thoughts, universals, ideal entities, not things as they immediately present themselves to us, that is, in their sensuous individuality – not even the water of Thales. For although this is also empirical water, it is at the same time also the in-itself or essence of all other things, too, and these other things are not self-subsistent or grounded in themselves, but are posited by, are derived from, another, from water, that is, they are idealized” (Hegel, 2010: 154-5). 29. This argument is close to one put forth by Paul Giladi (2014). 30. The experimental inquirer “will live in quite a different world – quite a different aggregate of experience – than unscientific world” (CP 1.236). The scientific revolution has ushered in nothing less than the modern world or, more accurately, is one of the revolutions by which this world was brought into being. 31. But, especially in his maturity, Peirce became increasingly appreciative of Hegel’s genius and accomplishments. One might say that his engagement with his predecessor points toward the achievement of ambivalence (Segal 1992). If it began in a one-sided antipathy, it evolved into a nuanced, qualified attraction and repulsion. 32. Peirce no less than Hegel was committed to rescuing universality (or generality) from abstractness; that is, he was in his way committed to the concrete universal. One text in which

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this is evident is his reflections on art in the 19th century: After stressing how art, specifically , in this century has valorized objectivity, he quickly notes: “It may be said that the of our literature is a contrary tendency to replace the universal and abstract by the personal and idiosyncratic. But such an objection is based on a comparison that has been cleared up in the early years of the century by Hegel, and which exact logic has rendered still more patent. Namely, the universal is not necessarily the abstracted. The abstractly universal is only the lowest kind of universal. Whatever is true is universal in a better [or higher] sense, and the personality of romantic literature is, in that sense, more truly universal than the labels of classification” (Wiener (ed.) 1958: 264). The secondness of thirdness (embodied Thirds in process of development) encompasses what Hegel identified as concrete universals. This is more than implicit in Peirce’s writings. There are passages, such as the one just quoted, wherein this point is made quite explicitly. 33. Of course, Peirce or one of his champions might respond by suggesting that what Hegel means by opposition here is altogether different from what Peirce designates as Secondness. I however am dubious that this is altogether accurate. 34. See especially John E. Smith’s (1987: 51-64). It is possible, even likely, that Peirce’s self- identification of his (“a Schelling-fashioned idealism” [CP 6.102]) is accurate. That is, he is regarding the question of freedom closer to Schelling than Hegel. Even so, he did note how his mature philosophy seemed to him to evolve in the direction of a position akin to Hegel’s (see, e.g., Fisch, 1986: 276). 35. “When philosophy becomes an adult science, as it will before the twentieth century is half over, the first question to be asked in weighing the importance of any philosopher will be,” Peirce asserts, “what important truth did he prove, in the sense in which in philosophy can be proved” (MS 470, 38; quoted by Fisch, 1986: 362). In my judgment, however, the first and likely most important question to pose for this purpose is, What fruitful questions did this or that philosopher pose? Heuristic fecundity is more telling than putative proof. 36. Peirce in effect invites us to do just this. As Fisch notes in “Hegel and Peirce,” with the practical experience of triangulation acquired from his work at the Coast Geodetic Survey, “it was natural for him [Peirce] to locate his own changing positions in relation to the nearest eminent landmarks. And the most eminent of the nearest was Hegel” (Fisch, 1986: 279-89). 37. As Alasdair MacIntyre (2006b: 85) notes: “the self-knowledge of a self-conscious has always to be cast in a historical form. The past is present in the self in so many ways and so important ways that, lacking historical knowledge, our self-knowledge will be fatally limited.” 38. The second epigram at the outset of this paper indicates just this. 39. I am not asserting that Peirce is simply wrong on this score, only that he exaggerates the extent to which Hegel fails to see human experience as a majeure force capable of overthrowing the putative necessities of absolute Reason. In Hegel’s account, experience is far more forceful and central, reason far more fragile and precarious, than Peirce typically seems to appreciate. 40. Richard J. Bernstein in “Why Hegel Now?” (1986: 175) wrote of Charles Taylor: “[He] approaches Hegel not primarily as a self-effacing commentator, but rather as a philosopher engaged in dialogue with another philosopher – seeking to show what we may learn from him in our attempts to understand the world.” This is precisely how Peirce also engaged Hegel’s writings. The work of comparative philosophy ought, in my judgment, be that of facilitating a philosophical dialogue, for the sake of from the exchange. If it fails to enhance our understanding of the world, it is an idle exercise.

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ABSTRACTS

Expressed in terms of his categories, Peirce criticized Hegel for having overlooked secondness, “not mere twoness [or duality] but active oppugnancy” (CP 8.291; emphasis omitted), “the sense of shock,” surprise, and especially struggle and conflict (CP 5.45). In particular, he judged his predecessor harshly for having neglected or, at least, downplayed the role secondness, especially in the form of experience, plays in the growth of knowledge. In Peirce’s judgment, then, Hegel’s emphasis on thirdness (mediation, conciliation, integration, and the overcoming of estrangement) tended to eclipse secondness (otherness, opposition, conflict, clash, and direct encounters with irreducible otherness). If one considers what Hegel actually wrote about both experience vis-à-vis reason and, more generally, the role of conflict in the generation of knowledge and indeed of much else, Peirce’s criticism hardly seems fair. My proximate purpose is, however, not so much to defend Hegel’s thought against Peirce’s charge as to show how close Hegel and Peirce are in their understanding of the relationship between experience and reason. Beyond this, my ultimate objective is to illuminate this relationship, by consideration of the nuanced, subtle manner in which these thinkers construe this relationship. That is, my main purpose is not hermeneutic or historical but philosophical. Becoming clearer about how Peirce stands to Hegel is not nearly as important as becoming clearer about how experience stands to reason. As it turns out, however, a philological comparison facilitates our philosophical task.

AUTHOR

VINCENT COLAPIETRO

Penn State University, USA Colapietrovm[at].com

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Peirce’s Hypothesis of the Final Opinion A Transcendental Feature and an Empirical Constraint

Aaron B. Wilson

1. Empiricist and Transcendentalist Approaches to Peirce’s Thought

1 Charles S. Peirce makes some of his strongest commitments to a form of empiricism in the 1903 Harvard lectures, in which he argues that “all our knowledge rests on perceptual judgments” (CP5.142/EP2:204) and that “perceptual judgments are the first premises of all our reasoning” (CP5.116/EP2:191). I have argued (Wilson 2016) specifically that Peirce’s mature architectonic – or the strands of it that begin to coalesce around 1902-1903 – is a particularly strong form of empiricism, in that it does not recognize any of our knowledge as a priori, or as indefeasible by the judgments of sense perception or by what can be correctly inferred therefrom. Even so-called analytic knowledge is not a priori, on Peirce’s account, as he holds that necessary reasoning involves perception or perception-like states involving imagined diagrams.1 An from an imagined diagram involves an inference from a type of perceptual judgment. Long before the 1903 Harvard lectures, in his 1877 “The Fixation of Belief” (henceforth Fixation), he argues against the “a priori method” of fixing belief in both science and philosophy (W3: 254-6), claiming that its essence is “to think as one is inclined to think.” Peirce specifically identifies Hegel as a proponent of the a priori method, and, in a footnote added in 1893, he also identifies Kant as one.

2 However, as it is well known, throughout his writings Peirce expresses his thought as having significant roots in Kantian philosophy. He also claims that his pragmaticism (as he calls it in 1904 and later) is closely allied to Hegelian absolute idealism – a claim that I will support in this essay.2 But whatever metaphysical ideas or elements he draws from transcendental idealism or from absolute idealism are stripped from any a priori epistemic foundation. For Peirce, strong empiricism is consistent with knowledge of

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metaphysical truths. As I have argued elsewhere, on his account, our sense perceptions represent instances of each of the three categories (Firsts, Seconds, and Thirds) including universals (or generals) and modal properties (such as conditional necessities),3 so that through inferential and prescissive processes we can distinguish objects or structures more general than what would fall within the purview of any special science. 4 On his account, even highly speculative metaphysical theories can be regarded as, at worst, bad empirical theories; and all the great metaphysicians of the past, from Parmenides to Hegel, were really only drawing from experience, if only poorly.5

3 Contrary to Peirce, most metaphysicians have been under the impression that they have been drawing from a source of knowledge that is epistemically closed off from sense experience, and that their metaphysical claims are thereby safe from the revelations of ongoing sense experience. Such metaphysicians include Kant, and such metaphysical claims include his claims about the conditions for the possibility of empirical knowledge – i.e., his transcendental idealism. Fully acknowledging Kant’s positive influence on Peirce, the strong empiricist interpretation of Peirce resists the interpretation of him as a type of transcendental philosopher, so far as transcendental philosophy assumes a priori knowledge of the conditions for the possibility of empirical knowledge.6 It is not inconsistent with the claim that there is something like a transcendental condition for knowledge in Peirce’s mature philosophy. Indeed, in this paper I will explain how there is.

4 As is well known, transcendental approaches to Peirce’s thought gained prominence with the publication of Karl-Otto Apel’s landmark work, Charles S. Peirce: From Pragmatism to Pragmaticism (1981). While at several places Apel acknowledges Peirce’s movements away from and disagreements with Kant, especially during the final period of Peirce’s thought (starting around 1898), Apel nonetheless argues that Peirce made a “semiotic transformation of ” (Appel, 1981: 191) that replaces the transcendental subject with an indefinite community of inquirers (ibid.: 193), and replaces a transcendental foundation for judgments of experience with a transcendental foundation for “the validity of the process of induction in the long run” (ibid.: 164-5). In Apel’s view, Peirce effectively makes an a priori argument for the validity of induction by applying the pragmatic analysis of “real” as that which is cognizable in the long run. In “The of Induction” (1878), Peirce argues that “that the rule of induction will hold good in the long run may be deduced from the principle that reality is only the object of the final opinion to which sufficient investigation would lead” (CP2.693/ W3:305). This certainly sounds like an a priori argument; and Apel is not alone in reading Peirce as making an a priori argument for the validity of induction.7

5 A systematic transcendental reading of Peirce has been most recently defended by Gabriele Gava, who argues that, in Peirce, an “ideal of rationality functions as a necessary but regulative (in Kant’s sense) condition to account for semiotic processes” (Gava, 2014: 2), and that, for Peirce, purposefulness is a “necessary regulative condition of thinking” (ibid.). While necessary conditions do not entail transcendental conditions knowable only a priori, Gava’s view is that, for Peirce, the purposefulness that directs semiotic processes, the esthetic ideal – which contains the final opinion or the logical ideal – is independent of experience in that it explains the semiotic process regardless of what experience might ever show. Gava is careful to distinguish between transcendental conditions as justificatory and as explanatory, and he argues that Peirce

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is only espousing the latter sort of transcendental condition. Nonetheless, this reading holds that, for Peirce, the transcendental conditions for semiosis cannot fail to explain semiosis as a result of any new experience or any new conclusion drawn logically from perceptual judgments.

6 As with other attempts to cast Peirce’s philosophy as a type of transcendental philosophy,8 Gava’s preserves Peirce’s fallibilism. This is easy enough, since transcendental idealism, or virtually any claim to a priori knowledge, does not entail . For whatever a-priori-knowledge-generating-faculties are postulated, those faculties can be assumed fallible.9 However, as is evident from “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man” (1868, henceforth Questions), Peirce is skeptical that we have any faculties other than (a) sense experience and (b) reasoning from sense experience, including ; and he seems particularly skeptical that we have the sort of faculties through which transcendental conditions of empirical knowledge have been presumed knowable.10

7 I argue that Peirce does identify conditions for the possibility of knowledge, but that these conditions are not transcendental. They are empirical laws which determine that our opinions will tend to conform more and more to reality over an indefinite course of experience and inquiry. That is, Peirce’s hypothesis of the Final Opinion may be regarded as, what Sacks (1997) calls, a “transcendental feature” of knowledge, which is a general condition for empirical knowledge, but where knowledge of that condition itself depends on the course of experience. The hypothesis of the Final Opinion, along with other hypotheses that coalesce with it and support it, are ultimately empirical hypotheses that are also transcendental features. Peirce recognizes that we need to explain how experience determines our minds to conform to reality. But he also recognizes that we can do so only through what we learn from experience.

8 Note, however, I will not specifically argue against other claims of in Peirce, such as claims concerning his universal categories (e.g., that Peirce treats their reality as a transcendental condition for the possibility of knowledge).11

9 While Peirce is engaged in a sort of “critique,” in the Kantian sense of an examination of the general conditions for and limitations of knowledge, I am unsure whether or not empiricists such as Locke, Hume, and Reid could also count as “critical philosophers” in that sense, since they too identified general conditions for and limitations on knowledge. Locke’s empiricist doctrine (that all our knowledge is built up from simple ideas of sense and reflection) and Hume’s copy principle (that all ideas must be copied from sense impressions) are each a general condition for or limitation on knowledge. Though Peirce emphasizes that his own position on first principles, “critical common- sensism,” has roots in Kantian critical philosophy, he regards critical common-sensism primarily as a variation of Reid’s philosophy of (CP5.439, 1905).

10 But the strong empiricist interpretation can grant that Peirce’s philosophy has significant roots in and affinities with the idealist movement that Kant initiated. In fact, Peirce’s philosophy may have more in common with Fichte’s, Schelling’s, and Hegel’s systems than it does with Kant’s. While it seems that each (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) sought to establish a priori the conditions for the possibility of empirical knowledge, each also sought, as Peirce did, conditions that would not entail a ding an sich (a transcendental object or a wholly extra-empirical realm) or a transcendental subject with which those conditions are supposed to lie. Though Fichte seems to retain some notion of a transcendental subject, a self-positing “I” that is knowable by a type of

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, this subject is not distinct from the self that is constrained by empirical law.12 Hegel also rejects Kant’s separation of the subject from experience,13 and so does Schelling, each replacing the transcendental subject and the transcendental object with an “Absolute” in which the subject and object become unified. However, Schelling and Hegel also suppose (at least at certain stages) that the Absolute is knowable a priori by intellectual intuition. Peirce’s early attack on such intellectual powers as intellectual intuition should be viewed as his earliest distinctive break with the German Idealist tradition, as well as his first significant commitment to some form of empiricism.

11 In the next section, I explain why Peirce draws the conclusion that there would be, with enough time and experience, a final conclusion to all inquiry. There are several auxiliary hypotheses underlying it, ranging from the belief-doubt model of inquiry to the hypothesis that natural laws are the result of evolutionary processes. In section three, I give a limited defense of Peirce’s hypothesis of the Final Opinion. In section four, I explain how the Final Opinion is a condition for the possibility of knowledge but not a transcendental constraint on it. Here I invoke Sacks’ (1997) distinction between transcendental constraints and transcendental features. While Peirce is not a transcendental philosopher in any rich sense, in the final section I explain how Peirce’s metaphysics, particularly his hypothesis of the Final Opinion, is remarkably similar (to varying degrees) to the Absolute of the Absolute Idealists – Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel – despite their apriorism.

2. The Final Opinion as an Empirical Hypothesis

12 Upon what does Peirce base his hypothesis that there would be, with enough time and experience, an ultimate conclusion that all inquirers would converge upon? As Daniel Herbert nicely puts it, “Peirce maintains that there is sufficient to support great confidence in the admittedly fallible hypothesis that the continuation of any given inquiry for a sufficient period of time would result in a final immovable consensus of opinion between the participants in that inquiry” (Herbert, 2015: 111). But exactly what, from experience, supports the theory that such a final consensus would eventually be reached? Herbert cites a passage from Peirce’s 1885 review of Royce in which Peirce argues that a final opinion has already been reached on many specific questions, including ones that were previously thought unanswerable (EP1:234). However, skeptics of Peirce will argue that the fact that consensus has already been reached on a number of questions does not imply that an unshakable consensus would be reached on all meaningful questions.

13 It is well known that Peirce arrives at the analysis of truth as the Final Opinion, and at the analysis of the real as the object of that opinion, by applying his rule for attaining the third grade of clearness in our conceptions (i.e., the “pragmatic maxim”). It is also well known that this rule tells us to consider the sensible effects the object of the concept would have under different agential circumstances, as the wider function of concepts is to guide the conduct of the agent who possesses it. As Peirce explains with respect to the third grade analysis of the concept of force: The idea which the word force excites in our minds has no other function than to our actions, and these actions can have no reference to force otherwise than through its effects. Consequently, if we know what the effects of force are, we are acquainted with every fact which is implied in saying that a force exists, and there is nothing more to know. (W3:270, 1878)

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14 Later Peirce will find his 1878 formulation and applications of the rule for attaining the third grade of clearness too nominalistic, and he will clarify that the object of a concept consists in the sensible effects the object (so conceived) would have under different sensible and practical circumstances. The object of a concept is conceived modally as a set or a system of habitual or dispositional properties, and not as a set of actual effects. What any object is, including what any “abstract object” is, is a collection or system of habits that are disposed to affect our experience and conduct.

15 Applying Peirce’s pragmatic maxim to obtain an analysis of a concept involves broad reflection over our experience and knowledge, or, at least, over any experience or knowledge that we think might be relevant, even if indirectly, to the object of the concept and to our conduct about it. It involves formulating an empirical analysis of the object of the concept – specifically, an analysis that describes the object in terms of habits or dispositions to produce certain types of sensible effects under certain types of sensible circumstances.14 While Peirce seems to identify the pragmatic analysis with the concept itself – he says that “our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object” (CP 5.402, my emphasis) – that analysis is most precisely a representation of the meaning of the concept. And, on Peirce’s view, symbols (concepts being mental symbols) are meaningful only within a wider network of signs. No concept can be made very clear or useful to inquiry in isolation from many other concepts, especially concepts directly applicable to percepts. Note that because the application of Peirce’s pragmatic maxim results in an empirical analysis, it involves abduction. Also note that, while Peirce does not deny that our concepts contain conventional elements, so far as it’s interpreted with pragmatic clarity, a concept is subject to revision in the course of inquiry. As many scholars observe, on Peirce’s view, meaning and knowledge develop together.15

16 Thus, where Peirce comes to analyze truth as “the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate” and reality as what is “represented in this opinion,” he is neither defining a new conventional meaning nor is he identifying a transcendental condition for truth or knowledge. He is offering an empirical hypothesis that clarifies the concept of truth and the concept of reality. Truth is that representation which we would tend towards holding in the long run of experience, and reality is the object of that representation. Moreover, as Peirce explains later, reality itself draws us toward that Final Opinion.

17 But how does Peirce arrive at these specific hypotheses about truth and reality?

18 In “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities” (1868; henceforth Consequences), Peirce suggests that the distinction between the real and the unreal first occurs to us as an empirical discovery, when we discover that we have to correct ourselves. Thus, the concept of self-correction becomes tied to the concept of reality in its very inception: [W]hat do we mean by the real? It is a conception which we must first have had when we discovered that there was an unreal, an illusion; that is, when we first corrected ourselves. Now the distinction for which alone this fact logically called, was between an ens relative to private inward determinations, to the negations belonging to idiosyncrasy, and an ens such as would stand in the long run. The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge. And so those two series of cognition – the real and

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the unreal – consist of those which, at a time sufficiently future, the community will always continue to re-affirm; and of those which, under the same conditions, will ever after be denied. (CP 5.311)

19 Peirce claims that the fact that we sometimes have to correct ourselves “logically” calls for a distinction between “an ens relative to private inward determinations” and “an ens such as would stand in the long run” – i.e., between the unreal or the figment and the real as the final opinion. Of course, how the phenomenon of self-correction calls for this distinction in particular is not very transparent. Peirce’s claim depends on certain other hypotheses developed in subsequent work.

20 One such other hypothesis is the well-known “belief-doubt theory of inquiry” that Peirce develops in Fixation and in other works.16 It does not itself prescribe methods of inquiry. It only describes the general psychological mechanics of inquiry. Surprise or failed expectation causes doubt in some belief, and the “irritation” of that doubt compels us to seek a belief that will satisfy that doubt – that is, until that belief gets disturbed by some further surprise or failed expectation. In Fixation, Peirce calls the struggle to escape doubt “inquiry,” and he regards inquiry generally as a self-corrective process.17 An experience causes doubt in some belief, and the uneasiness of that state compels us to establish a new state of belief that puts the doubt to rest.

21 Of course, self-correction and inquiry can come apart. With inquiry, the state of belief that eases doubt can be the same belief that was disturbed by doubt, such as when one experiences momentary doubt. But with self-correction, a different belief must be established and ease doubt, as “self-correction” implies that what was corrected was wrong and that the correction is correct. Now, with respect to what standard can a belief be correct or incorrect? Although it must introduce a normative dimension to inquiry, this standard needs to be intrinsic to the descriptive account. That is, it must have motivational force regardless of whether or not we intentionally adopt it, thus explaining why we would be inclined to adopt it intentionally. The standard must be the main source of our doubts. It must be external to our beliefs so that it can clash with them and cause doubt. Thereby, it must be something real, in the abstract sense of something that is independent of any representation of it.

22 It is crucial to distinguish how Peirce’s normative claims are motivated by his descriptive account. The belief-doubt theory does not itself say that by nature we seek (or are compelled to seek) beliefs that correspond with reality. It only says that we naturally seek a state of belief that eases the irritation of doubt. But upon the further observation that only by seeking to conform our beliefs with reality will we most expediently overcome the threat of doubt, the claim that we should seek to conform our beliefs to reality acquires motivational force. As is well known, Peirce calls the method that seeks to have our beliefs fixed by external reality “the method of science” (5.384/ W3:27). Other methods have us fix belief upon personal tenacity, social authority, or upon thought itself. While these methods might work in the short term, they will fail in the long run.

23 The method of science will most expediently deliver us from doubt because of the laws and mechanisms (or habits) through which reality affects our beliefs. Peirce thus adopts this further empirical thesis that real things “affect our senses according to regular laws” (ibid.). He conjectures: [T]hough our sensations are as different as are our relations to the objects, yet, by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how

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things really and truly are; and any man, if he have sufficient experience and he reason enough about it, will be led to the one True conclusion. (CP5.384/W3:27)

24 The conjecture here is not just that real things affect our senses. It is that real things do so in ways that bring our beliefs in conformity with them over time. Later in his writings, Peirce even theorizes that there is a sort of attraction between reality and our minds that takes place through our senses, comparable to gravitational attraction.18 He eventually surmises that the mind itself, in virtue of its outstanding ability to form new habits,19 is a self-correcting system. Although in the short term a variety of personal and social influences may compel us to hold false beliefs, even in the face of glaring counterevidence, in the long run those influences cannot withstand the overwhelming pressure of realty. Peirce remarks that even the most pigheaded of men “who has sworn by all the gods that he will never allow himself to believe the earth is round, and give him time enough, and cram that time with experience in the pertinent sphere, and he will surely come to and rest in the truth about the form of the earth” (7.78, c.1905). 20

25 Atkins (2017) points out that Peirce likely viewed the mind as a self-correcting system as early as Questions and Consequences, where he argues that mental action generally is of the nature of a valid inference (W2:214). If Peirce is correct there, then the mind would continuously self-correct and indefinitely approach the Final Opinion. But Atkins also points out passages in 1906 and 1911 suggesting that Peirce came to believe that the Final Opinion could only be reached or indefinitely approached if we adopt the right methods.21 In either case, the method of science ought to be adopted, if only because it would shorten the time it takes to reach the Final Opinion, more so than other methods (which might instead increase the time it would take, relative to the amount of time following no method at all).

26 The theory that anyone, with enough experience and reasoning, would eventually settle upon the conclusion that conforms to reality, where reality would no longer threaten to cause doubt, affords us our clearest notions of truth and reality – or so Peirce holds. The crucial point is that he seems to arrive at his theory upon several empirical considerations: (1) that generally we are compelled to correct ourselves; (2) that self-correction is most successful in the long run if we seek to have our beliefs fixed by external reality; (3) that there are laws of perception through which we are able to conform our beliefs to reality; and (4) that despite our various cognitive biases, over the long run, reality forces us, via laws of perception and cognition, to believe correctly. From these hypotheses he infers that the process of self-correction would indefinitely improve: gradually there would be fewer and fewer “surprises” that would occasion a need for self-correction.

3. Objections to Peirce’s Hypothesis of the Final Opinion

27 All of the above empirical hypotheses, though I think they are plausible, are far from being established facts. In addition, there are other questionable premises in Peirce’s reasoning to the conclusion that self-correction would tend toward a single final result, which concern why inquiry would not continue indefinitely in a linear fashion, or tend toward several different results. As Legg (2014: 210) explains: Even if inquiry produces convergence in belief, why should it be to one, single end- state? That Peirce’s account by definition forbids what might be called pluralistic

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convergence has been viewed as regrettably closed-minded. The charge has been pursued on a number of fronts: Quine in terms of his favoured ontological relativity: “[…] we have no reason to suppose that man’s surface irritations even unto eternity admit of any one systematization that is scientifically better or simpler than all possible others” (, 23), by imagining alien predication (“Realism and Relativism,” 554), while Rorty presses the charge in terms of human cultural sensitivity (Contingency Irony and Solidarity).

28 In one respect, the objection of “pluralistic convergence” may be based on a misunderstanding of the Final Opinion and of Peirce’s theory of signs in general. It does not matter what specific signs (or sign-) are used to represent real things. The forms by which the signs are interpreted also do not matter so much. What matters is that the signs and their interpretations allow the interpreters to anticipate and track real objects successfully, such that no further experience of that object could upset the interpretation or surprise the . While it seems impossible for two inconsistent theories to represent the same reality equally well, two theories can do so in such different ways that they might appear inconsistent.

29 It might seem that two genuinely inconsistent theories allow us to anticipate and track the same object equally well. But Peirce would object that even if they each appear to do so in the short term, differences will emerge in the long run (though, admittedly, the longer they prove pragmatistically equivalent, the greater reason we have to doubt Peirce’s hypothesis). In another respect, pluralistic convergence might imply that reality itself is pluralistic, or that there are a plurality of , such that these realities can be inconsistent with one another. The hypothesis of plural and even inconsistent realities is one that Peirce simply does not find supported by experience. As I will explain further on, although he agrees that there is real plurality or variety, he also thinks that experience shows that variety tends toward uniformity.

30 Another objection is that, if there are an infinite number of realities to form beliefs about, then there are potentially an infinite number of beliefs to form and of self- corrections to take place. There might be a final result of inquiry on many specific questions; but if reality is infinite then there could not be a final result of inquiry in general.22 Peirce seems to assume that reality is not only a single system, but also a closed and finite system that would, in the long run, affect all inquirers in the same way. What, we might ask, supports this assumption?

31 First, note that a final result of inquiry in general only requires that reality is finite in distinct relations and qualities, and not in the number of individuals. There can be an infinity of real objects if those objects are qualitatively and relationally homogenous, since then it is not necessary to represent each one individually: one only has to represent the kind or type (by its qualities and relations) and that there are infinite members of that kind or type.23

32 However, this only hones in on the problem further. Why does Peirce assume that there is not an infinity of real and distinct qualities and relations?

33 It is not clear that we find an explanation for this until 1887-88, in “A Guess at the Riddle” (R 909/EP1:245-79), in which Peirce defends the metaphysical theses that “law is developed out of pure chance, irregularity, and indeterminacy” and that the universe is becoming more and more governed by laws. He argues that “we look back toward a point in the infinitely distant past when there was no law but mere indeterminacy; we look forward to a point in the infinitely distant future when there will be no

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indeterminacy or chance but a complete reign of law.” (CP 1.409 / EP1:227). Peirce develops these ideas in his subsequent 1891-1893 Monist series, the first of which, “The Architecture of Theories” (1891), conjectures that “the only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature and for uniformity in general is to suppose them results of evolution” (CP 6.13 / EP1:288).24 While here Peirce might seem to make a transcendental argument, since he says the only possible way to account for laws and uniformity is via some evolutionary process, he is only overstating the strength of the evolutionary explanation. Peirce thinks that experience shows us that some evolutionary process best explains natural laws.

34 One empirical consideration that leads Peirce to the evolutionary hypothesis is that… when we attempt to verify any physical law, we find our observations cannot be precisely satisfied by it, and rightly attribute the discrepancy to errors of observation, so we must suppose far more minute discrepancies to exist owning to the imperfect cogency of the law itself, to a certain swerving of the facts from any definite formula. (W8:101, 1891)

35 Peirce’s prescience here is striking. As we now know, is an inherent feature of subatomic laws.25 He goes on to conjecture that biological and psychological laws also develop through evolutionary processes. At some places, he describes the process by which things come to be governed by laws as itself a law-governed process – i.e., a process governed by a law that he calls the law of habit (e.g. CP7.515). Here again, empirical considerations are what primarily lead him to hypothesize that there is such a primordial law. This is shown by an argument he makes earlier in the same essay: [E]very person who wishes to form an opinion concerning fundamental problems should first of all make a complete survey of that human knowledge, should take note of all the valuable ideas in each branch of science, should observe in just what respect each has been successful and where it has failed, in order that, in the light of the thorough acquaintance so attained of the available materials for a and of the nature and strength of each, he may proceed to the study of what the problem of philosophy consists in, and of the proper way of solving it. (CP6.9/W8:85)

36 We should suppose that Peirce followed his own recommendation here and drew much, philosophically, from the different sciences.

37 Whether or not it is well supported by empirical evidence, Peirce’s theory of the law of habit, that the universe is becoming more ordered and governed by law, explains why he would think that there is not an infinity of distinct qualities and relations, and that there is not a plurality of realities that can be inconsistent with one another. As order and lawfulness increases, variation decreases. Infinite variation is the opposite of order and lawfulness. It is chaos.

4. The Final Opinion as a Transcendental Feature of Knowledge

38 One might argue that Peirce is not committed to every real thing being an object of the Final Opinion. On the second grade of clearness, the real is conceived only as what is not dependent on any representation about it.26 And Peirce does not believe that a concept is meaningful only on the third grade of clearness, such that strictly first or second grade apprehensions of a concept are, separately from any third grade apprehension, completely vacuous.27 However, a mere first or second grade understanding of a

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concept is not as much use to inquiry as is a third grade grasp of the concept. We can meaningfully talk about reality simply as that which does not depend on any representation about it. But the concept of reality becomes particularly useful only when reality is conceived as dynamically related to perception and conduct. When so conceived, it is particularly and directly useful to the philosophical project of explaining how knowledge is even possible.

39 While Peirce denies the skeptical assumption that knowledge requires some form of absolute certainty, he belongs to the tradition that seeks to explain knowledge according to some metaphysical relation between the subject and the object of knowledge – a tradition that includes Kant and the German Idealists. Peirce’s theory of the Final Opinion, and all the hypotheses that support or enter into it, is his explanation for how the subject and the object are metaphysically related (though in Peirce the subject is most properly conceived as the indefinite community of inquirers). The relation is this: the subject is necessarily determined to represent the object correctly in the indefinite long run, as a result of the subject’s inherent ability to self-correct and the object’s inherent ability to be represented by it.

40 This metaphysical explanation of the subject-object relation accounts very well for the fallibility of all inquiry: progress toward the Final Opinion is a very long-term trend, so that at any particular point inquirers can draw a false conclusion. But Peirce’s theory also directly answers the question: upon what condition do we correctly represent the way things really are? His proposal is that a representation correctly represents the way things are when that representation would hold up over the long run of experience and inquiry (though it may be disturbed by doubt at various points). Observe that this is an external condition: whether a given representation has satisfied this condition is not introspectively knowable, or knowable a priori, as the Cartesian or the Kantian conditions for knowledge are supposed to be. It is not even clear that we would know that we have reached the Final Opinion when we have actually reached it. Plausibly we would, since whether we have reached the Final Opinion is itself a matter of fact or reality, and so would be correctly represented in the Final Opinion itself.28

41 An influential strain of recent Peirce scholarship does not view the tendency toward the Final Opinion as a metaphysical connection between the subject and the object of knowledge. Works by Hookway (2000, 2012), Misak (1991, 2007), Howat (2013, 2014), Legg (2014), and Atkin (2015) focus on Peirce’s notion of the Final Opinion as a regulative assumption or an intellectual hope – which it certainly is – however, upon this strain, Peirce is not committed to the truth of the claim that there would be a final result of inquiry with enough time and experience, as he only thinks that we need to assume or hope that there would be such a final result, either in order to motivate inquiry or to make sense of it as a rational endeavor (or both). Passages such as the following are cited as evidence for this interpretation. Peirce writes to Lady Welby: “I do not say that it is infallibly true that there is any belief to which a person would come if he were to carry his far enough. I only say that that alone is what I call Truth” (SS 73, 1908). However, in this passage, Peirce is only expressing the fallibility of his theory of truth. It is fallible particularly because it is an empirical hypothesis. Although the hypothesis might not be best characterized as a belief,29 Peirce endorses it so far as he thinks it is acceptable to endorse any metaphysical hypothesis.

42 Peirce is not committed to the claim that there will be a Final Opinion. He acknowledges that all life could end long before it would be reached (e.g. CP 8.43, 1885). But he is as

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committed to the claim that there would be a final result of inquiry as he is to any other proposition in his philosophy. As a fallibilist and empiricist, he does not commit to any philosophical claim as anything more than a reasonable hypothesis that’s subject to further inquiry. But the Final Opinion is a hypothesis to which he is fully committed as our most reasonable explanation for knowledge. Any attempt to portray Peirce’s theory of truth as something other than a metaphysical theory would be, by his own lights, to make him out as a sort of nominalist. Although he is a strong empiricist, Peirce does not shy away from metaphysics, or from metaphysical theories of truth.30

43 Sometimes attending interpretations of the Final Opinion as a regulative assumption or intellectual hope is the identification of a type of transcendental argument or element in Peirce. The idea is that the regulative assumption or hope that all inquiry will converge on a final opinion is a necessary condition for any inquiry – albeit a necessary motivating condition that does not entail that the assumption or the hope is true. As Atkin (2015: 453) says, “the indispensability of some assumption for a practice proves nothing about the truth of that assumption.” But it can be viewed as a transcendental element in the sense that the hope in or assumption of a final opinion is an indispensable condition for inquiry. Cooke (2005) goes further by arguing that this hope is not only a necessary motivational condition, but a necessary constitutive condition: what it means to inquire is, in part, to hope for an answer, even if one does not have sufficient evidence that an answer will be reached.

44 My approach recognizes a transcendental element in Peirce’s account of truth and inquiry and, seemingly in contrast to the Misak-Hookway line of interpretation, an element that involves a commitment (albeit tentative) to the truth that there would be a Final Opinion with sufficient experience. But this transcendental element is not knowable a priori. It is only a transcendental feature of knowledge, as opposed to a transcendental constraint on knowledge. Sacks (1997) makes this distinction upon reflection on the later Wittgenstein, and he argues that Wittgenstein’s notion of “language ” serve as transcendental features in his philosophy: Roughly, a transcendental constraint indicates a dependence of empirical possibilities on a non-empirical structure, say, the structure of anything that can count as a mind. Such constraints will determine non-empirical limits of possible forms of experience. […] A merely transcendental feature, on the other hand, is significantly weaker. Transcendental features indicate the limitations on what, at a time, can be envisaged as possible, and to which alternatives cannot be made intelligible as long as they retain their transcendental status. Given this reversed direction of determination it follows that while transcendental features indicate limitations on what can be envisaged, those limitations, in so far as they are determined by no more than empirical facts, can themselves change over time, and moreover can change in a way that is not subject to any constraints whatsoever. A transcendental feature is, to speak metaphorically, no more than a shadow of necessity cast by whatever practices are current. (Sacks, 1997: 178)

45 While a transcendental constraint is transcendent of all possible experience and determines the forms or limitations of experience, a transcendental feature is an empirical constraint on what is possible: it expresses only what we can currently envisage as possible. It does not transcend all possible experience, but is rather what we come to see as possible given our experience. It is “transcendental” only in the sense that it is the general structure to which any experience is currently expected to conform. But since we expect that future experience will conform to this general

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structure as a result of past experience, we have no basis on which to declare it impossible for any future experience to fail to conform to it.

46 Peirce’s theory of the Final Opinion (and the theories of cognition, inquiry, and natural laws that surround it) specifies the primary empirical constraint on knowledge, or the primary transcendental feature of knowledge, as it describes a general structure that knowledge is reasonably expected to take. The use of “transcendental” here seems broadly consistent with Gava’s (2014), where X is transcendental if X is necessary to some Y; or X is essential to Y. It is necessary to knowing that P that P would be accepted as part of the Final Opinion. But the metaphysical necessity here cannot be known a priori. Gava is correct that, in Peirce, we abstract “fundamental relational structures” from experience. But he does not adequately explain how Peirce accounts for our knowledge of these structures independently of experience. Prescission and abstraction from experience are types of from experience (CP 4.463); and if those inferences from experience are the only grounds upon which we can know the inferred object, then our knowledge of that object depends on experience.

5. Absolute Idealism and Intellectual Intuition

47 So while there is indeed some similarity between Peirce’s philosophy and transcendental idealism, it would be incorrect to assume that there are a priori elements to the former. There is a closer affinity between Peirce’s philosophy and absolute idealism. 31 Peirce could even be said to “empiricize” absolute idealism. One might also argue that, shortly following the publication of Kant’s first Critique, began shifting toward what may be described as a type of empirical method: phenomenology. And while phenomenology is better known as a method or style first employed by Hegel, it was arguably first employed by Fichte. Unfortunately, Fichte along with Schelling and Hegel still err in thinking that their conclusions are safe from on-going revelations of sense experience.

48 Fichte describes the conditions of experience in terms of the structure that presents itself qua a form of self-consciousness that he calls “intellectual intuition.” He claims that experience is structured most fundamentally by an “ego” and a “non-ego”, or an “other,” where the ego continually engages in self-conscious activity and conscious activity toward a non-ego, and where a synthesis occurs between the two activities – what he describes as a “reciprocal ” (Fichte, 1994: 281). This reciprocal causality appears to comprise a dynamical and teleological process. While the ego is finite and limited in its freedom with relation to the non-ego, the ego posits itself as an “absolute ego” – an unlimited ego or an ego of unlimited freedom. The ego strives to realize this unlimited or absolute freedom through its transactions with the non-ego, but it can ever only approach this absolute freedom. Fichte remarks that “man is to draw infinitely nearer to the in itself unattainable freedom” (ibid.: 92). Such absolute freedom is unattainable, according to him, as the absolute ego is only an idea or ideal – albeit one that is fundamental to the ego, more fundamental, it seems, than representation. As Adamson remarks, for Fichte “the essence of a conscious being is not representation or knowledge, but activity or freedom,” although this activity incorporates representation or knowledge (Adamson, 1881: 179). The activity is directed upon an ideal, the limitless or absolute ego, forming an “infinite tendency” toward an “unattainable freedom.”

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49 Peirce mentions Fichte at few places,32 though not with much affection. At one place he criticizes Fichte’s system as an “idealistic nominalism” (CP4.551, 1905), the for which I will not investigate here. But that accusation notwithstanding, the parallels between Fichte’s and Peirce’s systems are quite direct and significant, whether or not Peirce intentionally drew from Fichte or acknowledges these parallels. Not only does Fichte’s “Absolute Ego” seem to correspond to Peirce’s Final Opinion as an ideal toward which our practical activity (or at least our scientific activity) is directed and would draw closer to over time,33 they correspond in each being an ultimate condition or explanation for knowledge in the respective author’s system. Furthermore, Peirce’s analysis of experience is very similar to Fichte’s. Peirce describes experience as a “two- sided consciousness of an ego and non-ego” (8.330, 1904), where the non-ego resists and reacts against the ego (8.266, 1903) in a sense not unlike the one we find in Fichte. The ego is Firstness (freedom, spontaneity) while the non-ego introduces Secondness into our experience (Brute resistance, reaction). And their interactions with each other introduces Thirdness, a lawfulness by which our experience develops toward a certain end.

50 However, Fichte assumes a certain capacity of which Peirce is highly skeptical – a capacity for “intellectual intuition,” which seems closest to what, in Questions, Peirce criticizes as “intuitive self-consciousness.” Peirce does not deny that we are self- conscious, or that we have knowledge of the self. But he denies that this self-conscious knowledge is intuitive – i.e., not inferred or arising from other . But so far as this intuition is phenomenological and does not establish any a priori knowledge, there’s little difference between Fichte and Peirce in how they arrive at the conclusion that experience involves an interaction between an ego and a non-ego. It is well known that Peirce himself engages in phenomenological reflection in his phaneroscopic investigations of fundamental categories. He also seems to engage in phenomenological reflection in his description of experience as a clash between an ego and non-ego (to which he also comes through psychological theory, or reasoning from experience). Unfortunately, Fichte seems committed to an a priori knowledge of the ego and its activity. While Fichte says that intellectual intuition of the ego cannot be separated from sensible intuition of the non-ego within experience,34 he insists that intellectual intuition is a source of knowledge that is independent of sense experience, arguing that “intellectual intuition provides the only firm standpoint for any philosophy” (Fichte, 1994: 49-50). Yet, one might defend Fichtean intellectual intuition as little more than “reflection” or “,” which empiricists such as Locke (1689) have upheld as a type of experience.

51 Schelling’s metaphysics also casts reality in a dynamic and teleological form, and also bears resemblance to Peirce’s own dynamic and teleological semeiotic and metaphysics. Schelling treats nature as mind-like or purposive, developing from an unconscious materiality, to organic forms, to conscious beings organized socially, to an Absolute consciousness in which, in his Identitätphilosophie, the subject and object of knowledge are identical. One correspondence between Peirce and Schelling that particularly stands out is between Peirce’s “objective idealism” – the thesis that “matter is effete mind” and Schelling’s view that “the laws of mind materialize into the laws of nature, or the formal annexes the material” (1978/1800: 14). Peirce acknowledges this correspondence between his and Schelling’s philosophy: I have begun by showing that must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and of mind are regarded as

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products of growth, and to a Schelling-fashioned idealism which holds matter to be mere specialized and partially deadened mind. (6.102, 1892)

52 While Peirce does not share Schelling’s seemingly monistic view of the Absolute, he shares, at least in the 1891-93 Monist series, Schelling’s attempt to subsume the material world into a world of purpose and representation. Commentators have taken particular notice of this. Dea (2015a) argues that Peirce’s idealism falls in the absolutist camp, as opposed to James’s pluralistic version of idealism, mostly due to Peirce’s objective idealism. And Dilworth points out that Peirce’s idealism is Schellingian particularly because Peirce “forged a theoretical explanation of how mind turns into matter, not how, in a chance world, matter turns into mind” (Dilworth, 2016: 262).

53 But a significant strain of apriorism seems more evident in Schelling than in Fichte. On Schelling’s account, knowledge of the Absolute, or of the mental and developmental structure of reality, comes strictly by means of intellectual intuition. Sharply distinguishing intellectual intuition from sensible intuition, Schelling declares that “Intellectual intuition is the organ of all transcendental thinking” (1978: 27). Intellectual intuition has the Self or the subjective as its object, and from that intuition of the subjective conditions of experience we can arrive at a priori knowledge of the Absolute. Schelling also seems to identify intellectual intuition with the Self itself, making itself unconditioned by any previous cognition (ibid.). It is precisely this sort of intuition – immediate cognition of the self not determined by any previous cognition – that Peirce rejects in both Questions and Consequences.

54 I will not comment much on the affinities between Peirce and Hegel, as these are better known and as many of the same general points concerning Fichte and Schelling apply to Hegel. While Peirce agrees with Hegel that reality has a rational, purposive, or quasi- mental structure, which develops towards something like an “Absolute,” Peirce does not think, as Hegel appears to, that any of this can be known a priori. Recall that Peirce accuses Hegel in particular of following the a priori method, which is tied to another well-known criticism, that Hegel denies the reality of the first two categories, in particular Secondness. In his 1885 review of Royce, Peirce famously complains of Hegel: “The capital error of Hegel which permeates his whole system in every part of it is that he almost altogether ignores the Outward Clash” (CP 8.41). By the “outward clash” Peirce means the confrontation with external reality that we experience through sense perception.

55 But Peirce agrees with Hegel and Schelling, against Kant, that the conditions for the possibility of empirical knowledge do not lie with a subject understood as distinct from the object-in-itself. Instead, they lie with a dynamical, teleological union between the subject and the object. Yet, while there are clear parallels between the Absolute of the German Idealists and Peirce’s Final Opinion (or Final Interpretant), the German Absolute is a transcendental constraint knowable a priori, while the Final Opinion or Final Interpretant is only a transcendental feature. The Final Opinion explains the objectivity of our experience. But it is also a hypothesis or an abduction from experience. There are no special abilities, like “intellectual intuition,” by which we can know a priori that experience and inquiry would eventually result in a fixed and final conclusion about the world, or in a fixed and final interpretation of any given sign. Moreover, in Peirce, unlike in Hegel and in Schelling, the teleological process through the subject and object of knowledge are necessarily related is not be understood as an entirely mental or rational process. Peirce is clear that external reality, and our

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experience of external reality, involves a brute or non-rational element, and that this non-rational (and non-mental) element also drives the process leading toward the Final Opinion.

56 Apel is correct that Peirce’s philosophy involves a sort of synthesis of English and German philosophies (Appel, 1981: 20). Peirce purges nominalism from British empiricism and Scottish common-sensism, and combines empiricism and common- sensism with metaphysical theories that reflect those Hegel and Schelling more than they do those of Locke, Hume, or Reid. From a different angle, one can say that Peirce purges apriorism from German Idealism and combines it with epistemological and methodological principles that are more similar to those of Locke, Hume or Reid than to those of Kant, Schelling, or Hegel. The result is a system that might repulse proponents of both camps, but might nonetheless itself be a significant advancement toward that Final Opinion.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ADAMSON Robert, (1881), Fichte, University of Wisconsin, Madison, J. B. Lippincott.

APPEL Karl-Otto, (1981), Charles S. Peirce: From Pragmatism to Pragmaticism, Amhert, MA, University of Massachusetts Press.

ATKIN Albert, (2015), “Intellectual Hope as Convenient Friction,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 51 (4), 444-62.

ATKIN Richard K., (2016), Peirce and the Conduct of Life: Sentiment and Instinct in Ethics and Religion, Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press.

ATKIN Richard K., (2017), “Peirce on Truth as the Predestinate Opinion,” European Journal of Philosophy, 26 (1), 411-29.

COOKE Elizabeth, (2005), “Transcendental Hope: Peirce, Hookway, and Pihlström on the Conditions for Inquiry,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 41 (3), 651-74.

DEA Shannon, (2015a), “A House at War Against Itself: Absolute Versus Pluralistic Idealism in Spinoza, Peirce, James and Royce,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 23 (4), 710-31.

DEA Shannon, (2015b), “Meaning, Inquiry, and the Rule of Reason: A Hookwayesque Colligation,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 51 (4), 401-18.

DILWORTH David, (2016), “Peirce’s Transmutation of Schelling’s Philosophie der Natur,” Cognitio, 17 (2), 253-90.

FICHTE J. G., (1994 [1797-1800]), Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings, transl. and ed. by Breazeale D., Indianapolis, IN, Hacket Publishing.

GAVA Gabriele, (2014), Peirce’s Account of Purposefulness: A Kantian Perspective, New York, NY, Routledge.

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GILADI Paul, (2014), “Hegel’s Critique of Kant’s Transcendental Subject,” in Burwood S., Felges T. & Gray J. (eds.), Subjectivity and the Social World: A Collection of Essays Around Issues Relating to the Subject, the Body and Others, New Castle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 9-23.

HAACK Susan, (2007), “The Legitimacy of Metaphysics: Kant’s Legacy to Peirce, and Peirce’s to Philosophy Today,” Polish Journal of Philosophy, 1 (1), 29-43.

HAACK Susan, (2009), “The Growth of Meaning and the Limits of Formalism: In Science, In Law,” Analisis Filosofico, 29 (1), 5-29.

HARTSHORNE Charles, (1973), “Charles Peirce and Quantum Mechanics,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 9 (4), 191-201.

HERBERT Daniel, (2015), “Peirce and the Final Opinion: Against Appel’s Interpretation of the Categories,” in Gava G. & Stern R. (eds.), Pragmatism, Kant, and Transcendental Philosophy, New York, NY, Routledge, 94-113.

HOOKWAY Christopher, (2000), Truth, Rationality, and Pragmatism: Themes from Peirce, Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press.

HOOKWAY Christopher, (2012), The Pragmatic Maxim: Essays on Peirce and Pragmatism, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

HOWAT Andrew, (2013), “Regulative Assumptions, Hinge Propositions and the Peircean Conception of Truth,” Erkenntnis, 78 (2), 451-68.

HOWAT Andrew, (2014), “Prospects for Peircean Truth,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 44 (3-4), 365-87.

LEGG Catherine, (2014), “Charles Peirce’s Limit Concept of Truth,” Philosophy Compass, 9 (3), 204-13.

MIGOTTI Mark, (2005), “The Key to Peirce’s View of the Role of Belief in Scientific Inquiry,” Cognitio, 6 (1), 43-55.

MISAK Cheryl, (1991), Truth and the End of Inquiry: A Peircean Account of Truth, Oxford, Clarendon Press.

MISAK Cheryl, (2007), “Pragmatism and Deflationism,” in Misak C. (ed.), New Pragmatists, Oxford, Clarendon Press.

PEIRCE Charles S., (1931-1958) The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 vols., Hartshorne C., Weiss P., & Burks A. W. (eds.), Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. (CP)

PEIRCE Charles S., (1967, 1971), The Charles S. Peirce Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. References are to the system of categorization in R. S. Robin, The Annotated Catalogue of the Charles S. Peirce Papers, and R. S. Robin, The Peirce Papers: A Supplementary Catalogue. (R).

PEIRCE Charles S., (1977), Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between C. S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, Hardwick C. S. (ed.), Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press. (SS).

PEIRCE Charles S., (1982, 1984, 1986, 1989, 1993, 2000, 2010), Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, 8 vols., Peirce Edition Project (eds.), Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press. (W).

PEIRCE Charles S., (1992, 1998), The Essential Peirce, 2 vols., Houser N., Kloesel C. and the Peirce Edition Project, Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press. (EP).

PEIRCE Charles S., (1993), Reasoning and the Logic of Things: The Cambridge Conference Lectures of 1898, ed. by Ketner K. L., & Putnam H., Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. (RLT).

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SACKS Mark, (1997), “Transcendental Constraints and Transcendental Features,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 5 (2), 164-86.

SCHELLING F. W. J., (1978 [1800]), System of Transcendental Idealism, transl. by Heath P., Charlottesville, VA, University Press of Virginia.

SKAGESTAD Peter, (1981), The Road of Inquiry: Charles Peirce’s Pragmatic Realism, New York, Press.

WESTPHAL Kenneth R., (2003), “Can Pragmatic Realists Argue Transcendentally?,” in Shook J. (ed.), Pragmatic Naturalism and Realism, New York, NY, Prometheus Books, 151-75.

WILSON Aaron B., (2012), “The Perception of Generals,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 48 (2), 169-90.

WILSON Aaron B., (2016), Peirce’s Empiricism: Its Roots and Its Originality, Lanham, MD, Lexington.

WILSON Aaron B., (2017), “What Do We Perceive: How Peirce ‘Expands Our Perception’,” in Hull K. & Atkins R. K. (eds.), Peirce on Perception and Reasoning: From Icons to Logic, New York, NY, Routledge, 1-14.

NOTES

1. See Wilson (2016: 219-23). 2. In the full passage, Peirce explains that pragmaticism and Hegel’s absolute idealism come apart with the pragmaticist’s “vigorous denial that the third category (which Hegel degrades to a mere stage of thinking) suffices to make the world, or is even so much as self-sufficient” (CP5.436, 1904). 3. Wilson 2012, 2017. 4. As Peirce says, “metaphysics, even bad metaphysics, really rests on observations, whether consciously or not; and the only reason that this is not universally recognized is that it rests upon kinds of phenomena with which every man’s experience is so saturated that ususally pays no particular attention to them” (CP6.2, 1898). 5. See CP7.579, 1867; CP8.37, 1871; CP7.485 1898; CP2.203, 1901; and CP1.129, 1905. 6. I use “empirical knowledge” to include perceptual knowledge, or proposition represented via a strictly perceptual process, indexed directly to percepts, and theories that are supported inferentially upon perceptual knowledge. 7. The best discussion I have seen concerning whether Peirce defends induction on a priori grounds is in Skagestad 1981. 8. For instance, Westphal 2003 and Cooke 2005. 9. Resistance to the a priori mode of thinking is, fundamentally for Peirce, resistance to a way of blocking inquiry and a commitment to fallibilism. While apriorists can be fallibilists, their commitment to fallibilism cannot go much further than a recognition that their claims could be in error. The infallibilist element of the a priori method is that it takes its a priori claims to be immune from doubt triggered by perception or what we can infer from perception. 10. In Questions, Peirce claims: “all our conceptions are obtained by abstractions and combinations of cognitions first occurring in judgments of experience” (W2:208, 1868). 11. Herbert 2015 makes arguments against claims that Peirce’s universal categories (Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. In Wilson 2016, I argue that Peirce defends the reality of the categories based primarily on his logic and semeiotic, which he conceives as empirical inquiries (288-9).

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12. One could read Fichte as a type of empiricist, so far as he declares that “all being is necessarily sensible being” (472/225). 13. On this point about Hegel, see Giladi 2014. 14. While some of these habits or dispositions might be conceived as intrinsic to the object and, therefore, central to the concept, others might be conceived as extrinsic or obtaining only in relation to a wider system. But any habit attributed to the object must have some ability to affect and be represented through sense perception and conduct, in order to add our grasp and use of the concept. 15. For instance, Haack 2009 and Dea 2015b 16. For instance, the 1903 Harvard Lectures; in particular, see CP5.50-51/EP2:153-4. 17. Peirce describes science, common-sense, reasoning, and inquiry as subject to a process of self-correction, remarking that “inquiry of every type, fully carried out, has the vital power of self-correction and growth” (CP 5.583). 18. Peirce does so at least at two places: (1) “There is, then, to every question a true answer, a final conclusion, to which the opinion of every man is constantly gravitating. He may for a time recede from it, but give him more experience and time for consideration, and he will finally approach it” (CP 8.12, 1871). (2) “There is nothing extraordinary therefore in saying that the existence of external realities depends upon the fact, that opinion will finally settle in the belief in them. And yet that these realities existed before the belief took rise, and were even the cause of that belief , just as the force of gravity is the cause of the falling of the inkstand – although the force of gravity consists merely in the fact that the inkstand and other objects will fall” (CP 7.344, 1873). 19. See, for instance, CP 7.367 and CP 7.515. 20. More fully, Peirce writes: “Sooner or later [science] will attain the truth, nothing more. It means that if you take the most pigheaded and passionate of men who has sworn by all the gods that he will never allow himself to believe the earth is round, and give him time enough, and cram that time with experience in the pertinent sphere, and he will surely come to and rest in the truth about the form of the earth” (CP7.78, c.1905). 21. The passages are as follows: “if we can find out the right method of thinking and can follow it out, – the right method of transforming signs, – then truth can be nothing more nor less than the last result to which the following out of this method would ultimately carry us” (EP2:380). In 1911, he states, “I call[ed] ‘truth’ the predestinate opinion, by which I ought to have meant that which would ultimately prevail if investigation were carried sufficiently far in that particular direction” (EP2:457). 22. Peirce himself suggests that, even if a certain question would eventually be answered, several new questions may arise with each question that does get answered. In that case, it seems, we would never so much as even approach a final result of all inquiry. Peirce recognizes this a genuine possibility, but he does not believe that we have as much reason to accept this possibility as we do the alternative. He argues: “The problem whether a given question will ever get answered or not is not so simple; the number of questions asked is constantly increasing, and the capacity for answering them is also on the increase. If the rate of the latter increase is greater than that of the [former] the probability is unity that any given question will be answered; otherwise the probability is zero. Considerations too long to be explained here lead me to think that the former state of things is the actual one. In that case, there is but an infinitesimal proportion of questions which do not get answered, although the multitude of unanswered questions is forever on the increase” (8.43, 1885). Also see CP5.409 and EP2:457. 23. For example, “there exists three apples” represents precisely the same facts as “there exists an apple, there exists a second apple, and there exists a third apple” so long as the ordinal number is arbitrarily assigned and does not represent a particular position or relation among the individual members.

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24. Elsewhere Peirce characterizes the movement “from difformity to uniformity” as the “law of habit” (6.101, 1902). 25. For more on the connections between Peirce’s metaphysical hypotheses and quantum physics, see, for instance, Hartshorne 1973. 26. As Peirce puts it in “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” the real is “that whose characters are independent of what anybody may think them to be” (CP5.405/W3:271). 27. Originally, Peirce may have thought that the third grade analysis of a concept is the only genuine expression of a concept. But even if he had, he later gave that notion up. As he remarks to in 1903: “I ought to say that my three grades of clearness are not, as I seemed then to think, such that either the first or the second are superseded by the third, although we may say that they are acquired, mostly, in the order of those numbers” (CP8.218). 28. See Wilson (2016: 256-7). We might also worry about an infinite regression of knowledge claims: S knows that X, S knows that she knows X, S knows that she knows that she knows X, ad infinitum. 29. Peirce famously denies that belief has any place in science in the first of his 1898 Cambridge Conference lectures: “what is properly and usually called belief […] has no place in science at all” (CP1.635/RLT 112). For enlightening analysis of this claim, see Migotti 2005 and Atkins 2016. 30. Haack nicely explains how Peirce’s approach to metaphysics is empirical and distinct from Kant’s: “Kant assumes that metaphysics is distinguished from physics precisely by virtue of ‘lying beyond experience’ (PM, p. 15). Metaphysics will be an a priori investigation of the conditions of the possibility of human knowledge; and thus will stand ‘wholly isolated’ (PM, p. 11). But Peirce’s scientific metaphysics will be an a posteriori discipline, and anything but isolated. It will be continuous with the special sciences; but it is charged with investigating those aspects of reality too general to fall within their scope[.]” (Haack, 2007: 33). 31. Some might prefer “objective idealism” as the contrast to “transcendental idealism” within the German tradition. But a notion of an absolute or “unconditioned” plays a vital role in each Fichte’s, Schelling’s, and Hegel’s philosophies, and those are the notions I find most similar to Peirce’s notion of the Final Opinion. 32. At least among Peirce’s works published in the Collected Papers; I have not sufficiently searched for references to Fichte in works not published in that collection. 33. Two comments: First, whether the Final Opinion, like Fichte’s Absolute Ego, is an unattainable ideal is subject to interpretative dispute. On my reading, the Final Opinion is not unattainable. Perhaps the reason Peirce calls Fichte an idealistic nominalistic is precisely because Fichte sees the Absolute as unattainable. Second, the Fichtean Absolute Ego may correspond more precisely to the Peircean Summum Bonum, or the ultimate end of all action, is tied up with the Final Opinion, but is not it’s a representation (or not necessarily a representation). Fichte’s Absolute Ego is a state of absolute freedom, and that would more closely parallel Peirce’s Summum Bonum than his Final Opinion. 34. In Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte (1994: 47) writes that “intellectual intuition is always conjoined with some sensory intuition.”

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ABSTRACTS

Idealist and Strong Empiricist approaches to Peirce’s thought are irreconcilable so far as an Idealist interpretation commits Peirce to some form of a priori knowledge, particularly a priori knowledge of the conditions of empirical knowledge. However, while I favor the strong empiricist approach, I agree that there is something like a “condition for the possibility of empirical knowledge” in Peirce, and that this lies with his famous conjecture that, with enough time and experience, there would be a “final result” of all inquiry – “the Final Opinion.” Though some argue that this is mainly a regulative assumption or intellectual hope in Peirce, I contend that he is committed to it as an empirical hypothesis which we should provisionally accept. As an empirical hypothesis, it is not a transcendental constraint on knowledge, though it can be considered a transcendental feature (following Sacks’ (1997) distinction). That is, the thesis explains how knowledge is possible, but the epistemic status of the thesis itself is dependent on the course of experience. Here I explain how it is an empirical thesis and I explain the empirical considerations Peirce thinks support it. Though Peirce should not be considered a transcendental idealist in any robust sense, I give reasons for why he could still be considered a sort of absolute idealist.

AUTHOR

AARON B. WILSON

South Texas College awilson3[at]southtexascollege.edu

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Reclaiming the Power of Thought Dewey’s Critical Appropriation of Idealism

Jörg Volbers

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I thank James Matthew Fielding for a very productive criticism of earlier drafts of this paper; and Paul Giladi for the invitation to write on that subject and for his comments on the pre-final version.

1. Introduction

1 How ‘idealistic’ is Dewey’s philosophy, and why should we care? This article attempts to answer both questions by taking a closer look at Dewey’s criticism of idealism and Kantian philosophy. Its aim is to reconstruct the systematic reasons for Dewey’s self- understanding as someone who gradually “drifted away from ” (LW 5: 154) and from ‘idealism’ in a broad sense.1 This does not mean that we should take Dewey’s reconstruction of idealism as the last word on that subject. Quite to the contrary: I am sympathetic with current which tries to show how much Hegel there still is in Dewey (Bernstein 2013), or which points out how pragmatism’s critique of idealism is unfair, or that it at least overstates their differences (Emundts 2013; Pinkard 2007; Stern 2011). But setting aside the question of its accurateness, Dewey’s criticism of idealism is motivated by reasons which are important on their own. For what is at issue in Dewey’s distancing from idealism, I want to claim, is the correct understanding of rationality. Dewey accuses idealism of closing our self-understanding as rational beings by intellectualizing it. Thus, by looking more closely at Dewey’s relation to idealism, we gain a better understanding of his own alternative understanding of rationality and its systematic motivation.

2 One implication of this approach is that we should focus on Dewey’s mature philosophy. Dewey himself started his career as an idealist and then moved into the direction of pragmatism. But it is not until the appearance of Experience and Nature

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(1925) that his emancipation of his own idealist roots took full shape and Dewey’s alternative position came into fuller view – a position which he also explicitly dissociated from pragmatism, which he eventually took to be a misleading and therefore inapt classification for his work (cf. LW 12: 4). Thus, we will have to take the vantage point of these later works if we want to gain a comprehensive understanding of the systematic grounds of Dewey’s criticism of idealism.

3 Given Dewey’s own early idealistic leanings, it is no surprise that Dewey’s criticism of this tradition is far from a simple rejection. It operates against a background of great sympathy for the general direction of that tradition, and of Hegelianism in particular. For Dewey, idealism rightly highlights the human power to lead a rational life, thus defending a modern emancipation from and dogmatism. Idealism stands up for the power of critical reflection as well as for the constructive capacity of reason to determine normatively binding values. In other words, it is an articulation of the free and self-legislating power of the human being. Thus, Dewey’s criticism shares a common ground with idealism’s modern affirmation of the critical power of reasoning. However, Dewey accuses idealism of ultimately missing its main objective, by devising an all too rationalistic defense of reason, putting too much weight on concepts, logic and wide-ranging systematicity.

4 Focusing on this break seems to me particularly important with respect to Hegel. Hegel is nowadays often read in a rather humane, post-metaphysical and, yes, even pragmatist manner, as a social philosopher and as a defender of the varieties of experience (Pippin 1989; Pinkard 2002). From such a perspective, to accuse Hegel of holding an abstract metaphysical ‘’ – as Dewey seems to do – appears to be old-fashioned, one-sided, or even simply wrong (Stern 2005; critical: Horstmann 1999). Yet, as I want to point out, Dewey’s criticisms of idealism are not just exegetical. They express the wish, and even the felt cultural need, for a philosophy which actually does make a difference to the way we understand ourselves. In particular, his criticisms stand for the hope that philosophy can and should not be left to an intellectual elite. Idealism, with its demanding and highly elaborated philosophical concepts, its speculative metaphysics and its comprehensive aspiration, is not a natural candidate for such a democratic form of philosophy. So, rather than focusing on the hermeneutical correctness of Dewey’s understanding of idealism, I want to show how, by opposing certain aspects of that tradition, Dewey is attempting to reclaim the importance of the same philosophical question of rationality for ordinary life and everyday reflection that, on one possible reading, idealism originally sought to secure but failed to do so.

5 Consequently, the central theme of Dewey’s mature philosophy becomes ‘experience,’ rather than ‘the concept’ or ‘the self,’ as in the idealist tradition. This is more than just a pragmatist appropriation of an Hegelian theme; it expresses a new set of priorities. Idealism, as Dewey understands it, conceives rational thought in terms of conceptual understanding, thus giving conceptual relations methodological and even ontological priority. For Dewey, by contrast, thinking is subordinated to experience, and it therefore only “occupies an intermediate and mediating place” (MW 10: 320; cf. also LW 1: 372). Knowledge, likewise, is not an end in itself, but has always to be evaluated with respect to the role it plays in concrete experience: “all intellectual knowing is but a method for conducting an experiment” (MW 10: 324). Dewey considers thinking to be itself a form of experience and not the other way around, thus highlighting the

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constitutive non-cognitive, temporal and open dimension of all thought. Justly or unjustly, Dewey takes idealism to offer an account of reason which ultimately ignores such non-cognitive ways in which we are related to the world.

6 For reasons such as these, Dewey’s position is of more than mere historic interest. For ultimately, Dewey’s criticism aims at idealism as a representative of what he calls ‘intellectualism.’ ‘Intellectualism,’ for Dewey, signifies the widespread philosophical belief that rational thought is only concerned with explicitly articulated knowledge and cognitive content. This perspective, Dewey claims, ultimately misses the embedded and holistic nature of thought, as well as its relation to that what is not itself part of cognitive operations. It is this ‘intellectualist’ way of treating philosophical problems, against which Dewey objects, and on which we have to concentrate in order to better understand his break with idealism.

7 From that perspective, we will see that Dewey’s criticism opens up an important systematic option for . His rejection of the excessive valorisation of pure reason antedates a well-known and even well-trodden path in the philosophies of the 20th century. Phenomenology, post- and all agree that modern rationality is, if one might say so, excessively rational, and even dangerously so, by understanding rationality precisely in that ‘intellectualist’ sense. Moreover, they all took issue with idealism’s heritage, for this reason. As we now know, however, this discussion is too often framed in binary terms which are themselves deeply problematic – take, for example, Dreyfus’ (2006) phenomenological opposition of ‘conceptual determination’ vs. ‘bodily coping,’ or Adorno’s (Adorno & Horkheimer 2016) claim that enlightened thinking constitutively ignores the subtleties and nuances of experience, even violently so. Foucault once called this modern constellation the “blackmail of the enlightenment”: we seem forced to take sides, either for rationality or against it, and depending on our choice, we can be accused of either excessive rationalism or obscurantism. Ironically, from this perspective, the classical idealist systems, due to their anti-dualistic (Horstmann 2004: 25f.), seem more advanced and more contemporary than ever.

8 Dewey’s way to face the danger of excessive rationalism is to put the notion of ‘experience’ at the heart of his understanding of rationality. Yet that move alone does not constitute a depart from idealism. Dewey joins the idealist tradition in criticizing empiricism for what we call nowadays the ‘ of the given.’ Thus, Dewey shares the idealist understanding that experience is inherently rational and hence intimately connected with human understanding. Experience is not something brutely given; values, meanings and purposes are to be defended as a rational part of the world, not as mere projections upon it. Along with the classical idealists, Dewey believes in the constructive and even constitutive role of reason in the formation of knowledge by experience. Dewey’s main problem with idealism, however, is that it does not put enough trust into experience, hedging it within the confines of ‘Reason’ with a capital ‘R.’

9 Idealism, Dewey objects, explains the permeating rationality of experience at the expense of any actual experience and its unruly possibility to irritate thinking. A common expression of Dewey’s final judgment on idealism is his statement that it exclusively identifies “the object of knowledge with reality, equating truth and Being” (LW 1: 126). Here Dewey sees idealism under the influence of a deeply problematic philosophical tradition which identifies the knowledge of reality with philosophical

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knowledge, and thus treats reality solely as an object of thought. This understanding of philosophy is a part of ‘intellectualism’ in the sense mentioned above: It gives undue priority to knowledge when it comes to articulating our relation to the world, and moreover, it institutes philosophy as the final arbiter of any claim to reality.

10 Dewey’s systematic point, as I understand it, is that there is no need for philosophy to define in final terms what ‘rationality’ is or what it amounts to. If there is a need, it is common to all kinds of human self-reflection and not specific to philosophy. Rationality is something natural; it is embedded in organic life; and it is only one part of what makes human life special (the other parts being and linguistically mediated sociality in particular). Dewey’s position is comparable to Wittgenstein’s criticism of philosophy, that it is not satisfied until it has proven that language works, ignoring in the meantime that language has in fact long being doing the very kinds of work required to reach that conclusion at all. Likewise, the idealist is not satisfied until he has proven the ultimate importance and the final form of rationality on some metaphysical level. Dewey, on the other hand, offers a defense of what one might call the ‘ordinariness’ of reason. To use one of Dewey’s favorite methodological terms: he wants to reconstruct rationality, rather than to explain its particular power.

11 Thus, along with the idealists, Dewey accepts the idea of rationality as a driving force in the organization of life. Thinking opens up new possibilities of control and mastery, it is indeed ‘autonomous,’ as idealism claims – but only if we understand autonomy as constitutively bound to ‘heteronomous’ factors. Thinking, as Dewey understands it, only works by cooperating with non-thinking aspects of the world, such as tools, signs, bodies; or generally, by making use of circumstances and forces ‘external’ to thinking as such. Contra idealism, what makes thinking rational, then, is that it is exposed to an uncertain future, and that it is determined by habits which are never completely under its control. But showing that the very operation of reason depends upon time and upon the contingencies of the situation is no surrender of its critical autonomy.2 The idea is rather that reason can only solve its problems by linking its own fate with such ‘this- worldly’ factors. We are “dependent rational animals,” to pick up a phrase from Alasdair MacIntyre (2002). This statement is no contradiction, as if rationality required independence. We are rational precisely because we are dependent.

12 In what follows, I will develop this argument in three steps. The first, covered in sections 2 and 3, will reconstruct Dewey’s estimation of the philosophical tradition as a response to the ineliminable practical risks of living. ‘Thought’ seems to be such a promising candidate for philosophical reflection since it promises order in a life full of uncertainty. Idealism, as I will show in section 4, adds a specific flavor to that traditional high esteem. It argues for what we can call the ‘thesis of the irreducible human contribution.’ According to this thesis, all knowledge and experience is irreducibly bound to the structure of the thinking (human) mind, and thus also dependent on it. In consequence, every reflection on how we relate to the world also has to take into consideration how we relate to ourselves. But idealism, Dewey claims, misconceives this idea by articulating it in purely intellectual terms – this is the ‘intellectualism’ I have been introducing above. Dewey’s own positive conception, to which I turn in the last section, accordingly highlights that the effectivity of thought can only be explained by reference to that what is not thought – a constitutive difference which the idealist tradition mistakenly tries to close off.

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2. The Promise of Thought

13 Idealism misunderstands rational thinking – this is one way to articulate Dewey’s opposition to that tradition. Such a claim from Dewey’s side requires a preconception of what ‘thinking’ is, empirically, prior to any philosophical rationalization. The building blocks for such an account can be found in his pedagogical writings (How we Think, and Education) and are developed at some length in Reconstruction in Philosophy, in The Quest for Certainty and Experience and Nature. Dewey’s approach is historical. Thinking is not anthropologically or transcendentally given; rather, it has been culturally discovered and cultivated. We have to look at this history in order to understand what is at issue with this concept (cf. LW 1: 126).

14 Such a look at history cannot claim to discover thinking as it is ‘in itself.’ Even though Dewey sometimes sounds like he is describing the real (‘empirical’) nature of thinking, it is an essentially open term. History provides material, but no final judgments on the matter. What thinking ‘really’ is, has to be determined again and again through thinking itself: “We do not know what meaning is to be assigned to ‘reflective thought’ except in terms of what is discovered by inquiry into inquiry” (LW 12: 29). So Dewey’s historical observations should not be taken as disclosing some hidden origin of thought. Rather, they provide conceptual landmarks for his own ‘inquiry into inquiry.’

15 Philosophical interest in thought and thinking, according to this historical approach, is continuous with the ordinary, everyday interest in thought and thinking. It picks up cultural preconceptions and articulates them. Philosophical theories might eventually break radically with ordinary life, but they begin by responding to a commonly experienced practical feature of thought. By thinking, the human being seems to be able to introduce order into a world full of contingency and disruption. Thus, there is a practical ground which justifies Western philosophy’s traditional preoccupation with knowledge, reason and rationality (LW 4: 234). In Dewey’s words: The striving to make stability of meaning prevail over the instability of events is the main task of intelligent human effort. (LW 1: 49)

16 Rationality, according to this understanding, is a means to generate stable meanings over and against an inherently unstable world. Note that Dewey’s description implies a gap between thinking (what he calls “intelligent human effort”) and the “instability of events.” Firstly, thinking is concerned with the “stability of meaning,” as opposed to the stability of events. Therefore, its foremost task is to understand and to describe the change of events, not to stabilize them in the sense of ‘fixing’ them.3 Furthermore, thinking is only described as ‘striving’ to fulfil this task, implying that even this more modest goal will often be frustrated. This reservation is well expressed in the classical understanding of philosophy as the love of , and not wisdom itself, which Dewey embraces (cf. MW 11: 43).

17 Dewey’s rather wide and historic conception of thought distances itself from the modern identification of thinking with scientific rationality. In Dewey’s perspective, by contrast, the scientific treatment of problems is only one way of thinking among many possible others. Its value stems from the particular role scientifically warranted knowledge can play in experience, rather than from the rigorous systematic or logical form this kind of inquiry assumes. Yet Dewey is not (pace Rorty 1979) simply renouncing the need for epistemology and epistemological justification. Rather, he conceives epistemological thinking as one region within the wider area of thinking in

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general. Knowledge is special insofar it has to be true to the events; but there are many more ways to investigate the meaning of events than just scientific knowing. As Dewey puts it: “Beyond this island of meaning which in their own nature are true or false lies the ocean of meanings to which truth and falsity are irrelevant” (LW 3: 4). The overarching goal of thinking, according to this understanding, is to give significance to the course of events, not to control or to predict it.

18 Keeping in mind the distance between thought and its possible real effects helps to avoid a reading of Dewey’s remarks that is too heavily pragmatist. Dewey consciously avoids the rather short-sighted position that thinking is valuable only because of its efficacy. On the philosophical battleground, such an argumentation would indeed amount to a simple petitio. Dewey would thus project a pragmatist criterion of efficacy onto the history of thought, but only to use it as purported ‘evidence’ for the defense of his own, pragmatist-leaning, understanding. Such an approach would imply that is the only criterion of all thought, and thus define thinking, instead of registering its different forms, as Dewey wished.

19 The deeper systematic issue, however, is that such a purported pragmatist preconception of thought would cut through the recursive definition quoted above. Thinking is what thinking determines itself to be, according to the objective needs of the situation. This self-referential definition is not an evasion of philosophical responsibility, but an expression of the necessity to keep the means of reflection responsive to varying historical and cultural demands. According to Dewey, any form of reflection is a possible response to some experienced rupture in thought or action, that is, to the thought-provoking experience that a situation has become “indeterminate” (LW 12: 109). The adequate determination of the individual problem at hand, whatever that may be, might call for new methods and concepts. Thus, thinking has to remain sensitive to the need for change and amendment, as required by the subject-matter at hand: “All materials of experience are equal […] each has a right to be dealt with in terms of its own especial characteristics and its own problems” (LW 4: 172). In order to do justice to the wide variety of problems experienced, a wide variety of thought is required.

20 Thought, according to Dewey, is therefore discussed better in terms of its potential. Accordingly, Dewey’s history of thought is a history of the discovery of new promising potentials of thought and the subsequent historical work of determination of these ideas. The experimental empirical method of the natural sciences, for example, had to be formed; it was neither simply given, nor created at a single stroke (LW 4: 77). Yet Dewey insists on a common thread running through all the forms of thinking which might possibly emerge – they have the power to find order in chaos: “When thinking is successful, its career closes in transforming the disordered into the orderly” (LW 1: 60).

21 Here we come to the core of Dewey’s empirical description of thought. In thinking, we are able to reach necessary or determinate conclusions which can orient our actions. This work is done by integrating an uncertain phenomenon within a wider context. One of Dewey’s (characteristically medical) examples is the knowledge of typhoid fever: Issuing such a diagnosis means being able to do something about it, instead of succumbing to the mere ‘what-ness’ of the symptoms manifested. More precisely, through the diagnosis, the phenomenon becomes a symptom, from which an indication of possible ways of treating the illness follows (LW 4: 234). This example focuses on epistemology and its potential to guide human actions; but it can be generalized to all

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cases of successful thinking which enable us to relate to an initially problematic phenomenon, be it an illness, a puzzling smile or the unsettling experience of a modern artwork.4 Thinking transforms “the unclear and ambiguous into the defined and unequivocal,” it changes the “disconnected into the systematized” (LW 1: 60). Note that the ‘unity’ implied here is not to be confused with ‘harmony’; it denotes a merely formal integration of the into a network of meaning which itself is full of tension and contradiction.

22 The necessity discovered by thinking is valuable because of its stark contrast to the precarious and contingent nature of action. Living is a practical activity; there are always things which need to be done. But Dewey never tires of reminding us that no practical activity is ever secure: “Doing is always subject to peril, to the danger of frustration” (LW 4: 27). This statement, and the many others like it found in Dewey’s work (cf. LW 4: Ch. 1, or LW 1: Ch. 2), are not empirical observations. They point rather to the fundamentally contingent nature of action. Since every action is temporal, it requires the agent to act in what might be described as a ‘subjunctive mood’: We act as if we know where our actions will lead to, but the result of any action, even that taken from within the most controlled settings, can always fail to meet our expectations.

23 In action, therefore, we are by necessity focused on something which has yet to turn out to be what we expect from it, and we are ourselves in turn dependent on this course of events. This unavoidable transitory structure of action (and of organic life in general) makes thinking stand out. It promises to disclose necessary structures which prevail even when the events themselves disappoint. Thus, Dewey’s systematic argument is to point to a normative gap between our understanding of a situation and its resistant reality. The quest for certainty is not simply the quest to get hold of what is valuable, in terms of possession or ownership. It is the quest, rather, to know what one is about. The certainty it seeks is a formal feature of any successful normative relation which enables us, say, to identify an object, or to recognize a valuable action, or to know how to judge someone’s behavior. Thinking is primarily concerned with those normative relations, and only in a secondary sense with tangible results.

24 Again, thinking is kept at a distance from reality: it works with relations which are certain precisely because they are normative, and at a remove from the actual course of events. In this way, thinking can provide stable terms of judgment, standards of correctness, and justifications of goals, desires and values. Its primary goal is to ensure “the validity of intellectual beliefs” (LW 4: 32; my emphasis), as Dewey points out. The fact that these beliefs can, and most often will, stand out in stark contrast to the real course of life, actually enforces the importance of thought. The intellectual problem always remains the same: to know whether the situation is at least rightly understood. Such an understanding might be given in terms of a scientific explanation or in terms of a meaningful narrative of another sort; it might involve religious beliefs or restrict itself to a strictly secular standpoint; but it is still thinking – a means to relate to the world in a more meaningful way. According to this conception, then, philosophy’s task, to which we turn now, is to explain that particular power of thinking.

3. Explaining the Power of Thought

25 The previous section outlined Dewey’s understanding of thinking as a natural, everyday process, and thus, like all other natural processes, as an historically unfolding event.

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Intelligent reflection is a means to secure, establish and re-establish normative relations (‘meanings’) which promise to make sense of what is happening. This conception is not particularly pragmatist. What is pragmatist, though, is Dewey’s additional claim that thinking should eventually expose itself to the consequences of real events, because that is where, for Dewey, its genuine authority arises (LW 4: 110). For it is such attention to consequences that separates responsible inquiry from mere wishful thinking.

26 It is important to keep in mind, however, that Dewey is not claiming that other philosophical conceptions of rationality are simply wrong, nor is he claiming that they are irrational. Quite to the contrary: given the recurrent gap between thinking and reality, nothing is more natural and self-evident than to explain the integrative power of thinking by reference to some ultimate, transcendent order to which thought maintains a privileged access. After all, philosophy participates in the general human concern to reach the “greatest attainable security of values” (LW 4: 28).

27 In consequence, the historical dominance of the “spectator theory of knowledge” (LW 4: 14) within philosophy is no accident. Far away from being a simple mistake, it constitutes itself a rational way of explaining thought. Separating the “realms of knowledge and action” (LW 4: 14) allows to make sense of that impressive stability pertaining to the products of thought. Compared to the ordinary vicissitudes of life, the products of thinking seem to be so superior that they must spring from some other source. Since temporal, practical activity is by definition exposed to the danger of failure and the risk of misunderstanding, thinking seems to be an activity of a completely different order. The normative power of thinking, along with its demonstrable (albeit limited) capacity to find and establish necessary relations, is attributed to a stable and stabilizing realm on its own.

28 Accordingly, ‘reality,’ in the philosophical sense, is identified with that stability and located in the stable order of thought, as opposed to the ordinary world of changing phenomena and shifting appearances. In this traditional view, the power to make sense of the world is due to cognitive apparatuses participating in this other-worldly sphere.5 Idealism, in Dewey’s eyes, shares this traditional approach to some degree, as we will see in the next section.

4. The Human Contribution

29 The observation of the previous sections sheds some light on Dewey’s complex relation to idealism, the central topic of this article. We have seen that for Dewey, the power of thought is empirically given; but what remains contentious is how to explain, and to further determine, that power. Dewey’s criticism of idealism, then, focuses on this second step. According to Dewey, idealism rightly claimed that knowledge, value and meaning can be both objective and a human product; this view vindicates the power of thought. In doing so, idealism acknowledges the rise of modern science and its impressive power to understand, and to change, the world in unprecedented ways (LW 1: 125f.). But it wrongly construed this relation in purely intellectual terms, Dewey claims.

30 In terms of the historical narrative just presented, idealism accepted that rational thought does indeed have a power that makes a difference. In order to explain that

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difference, idealism points to experience. Human experience is not completely ‘alien’ to the thinking human mind; it is dependent on the categories, the norms, the concepts and the beliefs the mind entertains. Furthermore, this infusion of the human mind to experience does not devalue the power of thought. Quite to the contrary: thought, idealism claims, has the power to disclose objective features of reality only because of that junction of mind and experience. In this way, idealism comes to acknowledge what I call the ‘human contribution’ to all experience (cf. for Dewey’s analogous use of that term, LW 10: 250-75). For Dewey, recognizing the human contribution to all knowledge is essential to modern philosophy and cannot be taken back. But idealism went astray, Dewey claims, in conceiving this empowering link between thought and world only intellectually, that is, mainly in terms of thinking and knowing.

31 One problem with Dewey’s criticism, however, is that it addresses ‘idealism’ in a very general and abstract way. It can be profitably compared with references to ‘the skeptic’ in some contemporary discussions: they point to a general attitude within philosophy, not to some specific author.6 That might have been an important strategic move in Dewey’s times, when idealism was a well received (though already stumbling) contemporary option. Yet historically, ‘idealism’ covers many different positions, beginning with Fichte, Schelling and Hegel – the classical German idealists – up to and its American reception (Green, Bradley, Royce). In particular, there are many different ways to address the ‘thinking mind’ in idealism, ranging from Fichte’s I to Hegel’s Geist up to its various later interpretations. All of these varieties imply different concepts of what reason, rationality and thinking are like – take, for example, Hegel’s distinction between the Objective Spirit and the Subjective Spirit, which are both rational and yet can hardly be said to ‘think’ in the same way. Dewey’s diagnosis lacks the depth and the cogency of a detailed study. His remarks about idealism, if not simply directed at ‘idealism’ in general, often refer rather vaguely to philosophers he considers to be idealists, without a detailed discussion of the authors or the concepts in question.7

32 Instead of discussing Dewey’s position towards a specific idealist author, then, it seems more productive to follow Dewey’s own understanding and to use ‘idealism’ as denoting one fundamental option within classical modern epistemology. This option is based on the Kantian claim that the object of knowledge is determined by thought.8 In Dewey’s view, that claim is more than just a piece of epistemology. It further implies that all knowledge and experience is only to be had with that irreducible human contribution to it. According to that claim, knowledge is never simply forced on us. Rather, knowledge is an expression of an active relation to the world, on the part of the ‘self,’ the ‘subject’ or the ‘mind.’ There’s no knowledge, no value, no meaning, not even a habitable world, without this specific human contribution. In consequence, the power of thought becomes itself a specific human power, and cannot be taken anymore to be aiming at a pre-existing non-human truth.

33 According to Dewey, then, we have to see idealism primarily as defending the central modern idea of rational self-determination. This idea, embodied in the Kantian ‘Copernican Revolution,’ allows idealism to defend modern human freedom as an emancipation from theology and rationalist metaphysics, Dewey claims (LW 4: 229-30). It identifies rationality with criticism and grants it the power to conform only to those standards and measures it can rationally approve of. It points to the possibility of living a self-determined life in a world that is not alien to us.9

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34 Such a view on idealism is still widely held today.10 We can trace it back to Kant’s claim that the categories of experience are the work of the faculty of the understanding, which in turn is considered as belonging to the transcendental rational nature of the human being. Of course, Kant’s original claim raises well-known problems and paradoxes, such as epistemological skepticism, an all-too mechanistic understanding of nature, or the problem of the justification of the allegedly ‘transcendentally given’ categories of the mind (cf. Horstmann 2004: 25-69). However, the idealist critics of Kant – Fichte, Schelling and Hegel – were not trying to question the main idea of rational self-determination. Rather, they sought to defend this claim by setting it up on more intellectually solid ground. What is common to them all is the conviction that our experience of the world, in one way or the other, is the product of the activity of the mind. That human factor, idealism claims, is an indispensable ingredient of all knowledge, without which any given experience would be normatively inert and thus without meaning.11

35 Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy thus dramatically extend the classical philosophical search for self-knowledge. As a consequence, the ancient call to ‘know oneself’ cannot be limited anymore to practical matters only. If reality, or at least our knowledge thereof, depends on the specific ways our mind is constituted, that very constitution moves to center stage of philosophical reflection. There simply is no way to find out what reality ‘really’ is, or what it can possibly become, without figuring out what concepts, categories and norms we do contribute to it. Thus, all philosophical subject-matters turn into questions concerning our relation to the matter discussed. Furthermore, this relation cannot be reduced to the contact between ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ as the post-Kantian debate in idealism has shown. Hegel, for example, extends the constitutive dimension of the mind, upon which philosophy has to reflect, to the dynamic development of nature, history and society on a grand scale. Idealism, thus conceived, adds reflexivity to the quest for certainty to a degree hitherto unknown.

36 Importantly, the acknowledgment of an irreducible human contribution further introduces a new dimension of philosophical responsibility. Kant’s famous opening sentence of the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason illustrates that point: Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which […] it is not able to ignore, but […] it is also not able to answer.12

37 Reason, Kant claims, plagues itself with questions which cannot be answered because they are wrongly put. For that reason, Kant’s critical philosophy wants to dissolve these questions. They rest on a self-understanding that is wrong, because it is uncritical, Kant claims. Here, the quest for certain knowledge is turned against the inquirer itself. Thus, the Kantian way of questioning rationality, as Conant (2012) shows, actually adds a further reflective turn to classical Cartesian skepticism. While Cartesian doubts only bear on the possible contents of thought, Kantian-inspired skepticism expands them to the very forms of reasoning itself, the way reason is structured. Philosophical reflection, thus, is not exempted from doubt. In consequence, any non-dogmatic judgment about the world also has to consider our very understanding of such a judgment, that is, our critically reflected understanding of ourselves.

38 Dewey’s mature criticism of idealism has to be seen against this heightened sense of reflective responsibility introduced by that philosophy. In Dewey’s eyes, idealism’s acknowledgment of the human contribution remains half-hearted. The idealist authors

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rightly point out that in answer to Kant’s question ‘How is knowledge possible?’ a reference to the forming and intervening activity of the human mind is unavoidable. Yet they conceive this activity from a traditional perspective, Dewey claims. According to idealism, as Dewey understands it, knowledge is made possible by belonging to an encompassing structure of the I, the mind or the spirit; that is, the activity in question is delegated to the internal working of this structure. Idealism, Dewey thus claims, again locates “the ideal authority of truth, goodness and beauty” in an ultimate structure of being (LW 1: 52). It “fails to note the empirical concrete nature” of inquiry (LW 1: 61); it is “guilty of neglect that thought and knowledge are histories” (LW 1: 126).

39 It is easy to misunderstand these criticisms, in particular with respect to Hegel. Dewey seems to overlook the eminently practical character of Hegel’s philosophy, his criticism of abstract thinking and overly unrealistic ideals; and Dewey seems to be particular ignorant of Hegel’s dialectical insistence that all concepts have to realize themselves by way of confrontation with that which is not conceptualized yet. But Dewey’s real target is the overall philosophical attitude. He actually speaks in high terms of Hegel’s “glorification of the here and now” (LW 4: 51), but he mistrusts the “schematism” (LW 5: 154) of Hegel’s general philosophical approach.

40 As a consequence of that approach, the initial responsible insight into the human contribution is again cast into a grand metaphysical scheme or logic. For idealism, the concrete singular experience is of cognitive and moral value only insofar it remains “prophetic of some final, all-comprehensive, or absolute experience, which in truth is one with reality” (MW 3: 128). In doing so, the effectiveness of thought, the power of understanding, is attributed to an overarching structure – at the expense of the specific individual actions and the present aspirations.

41 Traditional intellectualist philosophy, thus, drives a wedge between idealism’s own acknowledgment of the human contribution and its articulation of that idea. Post- Kantian idealism, Dewey claims, is forced to oscillate between two poles which it cannot really unite. It insists on thought as “operative and constructive” (MW 3: 133), that is, it insists on the importance of thought as a regulating agency, as an intervening force that makes a difference. But idealism also feels obliged to rationalize being itself, and thus treats thought as a part of the ontological layout of reality (cf. also LW 1: 60). Thought, then, becomes itself a given (that’s the Kantian variant) or is declared to be becoming itself (most prominently in Hegel).

42 The point now is that this second, ontological strategy undermines the original insistence on thought’s regulative power. It makes it hard to explain that there is something to be gained by further reflecting on thought in its regulative function. That way, the newly gained responsibility for thought is evaded again. All changes in the structure of thought have to be either denied, or they have to be attributed to the ontological process itself, thereby bypassing our current desires and struggles. In any case, ‘thinking’ is located on such a remote, philosophical plane that it is far removed from actual experience and its needs and pressures.

43 Dewey’s criticism, thus, aims at preserving what we could call, following Haugeland (1998), the existential dimension of rationality. Understanding ourselves is something that matters, and it matters precisely because we are, in reflecting, as idealism points out, forced back upon ourselves again and again. But idealism is led astray by consistently situating that rational self-reference within a structure detached from the current situation, in the existential sense.

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44 The problem, then, is of a practical nature. Dewey wants reflective thought to remain a vital option. Since the very way we think makes a difference, the ways of thinking themselves must remain open to reflective change. They have to be responsive to the given situation. Like a tool, thought is supposed to do its work; but it has to be open to modifications as well as to alternatives. Consequently, any conception of rationality which is interested in preserving thought’s flexibility has to move beyond intellectualism. It has to attribute a determining role to the non-thinking, embedding context of thought. Due to its exclusive focus on knowledge and logic, intellectualism cannot cope with that existential and experiential background of thought proper.

45 Ultimately, the rejection of intellectualism amounts to the claim that thought is temporal in its very nature, and not due to some secondary limitations of the finite human mind. The very fact that thought matters to us is itself already not a purely intellectual fact, that is, it is not something to ‘know’ or even to ‘prove’ by means of distanced logical deduction. Thought matters insofar as there is something at issue, something that is as yet indeterminate, unknown, opaque; in pragmatist terms: thought is a response to a problematic situation. Looking at that problematic situation from the standpoint of knowledge and theoretical certainty, intellectualism reduces this problematic situation to a mere intermediary step towards greater knowledge. As a consequence, it subordinates the process of thought to its results. For Dewey, though, thought has to be fully accepted precisely in this temporal dimension in order to even make sense of its results.

46 Maybe the best way to summarize Dewey’s criticism is to say that he does not only want to keep thought open for continual revision, as most modern philosophers do. Additionally, he wants to defend the existential relevance of this openness and reflexivity. Not just thinking, but also the ways we think do matter for us, individually, in the situations in which we happen to be. Idealism, one could say, evades this existential dimension by arresting thought metaphysically. This evasion, though, is due to a deeper underlying issue, that runs throughout the philosophical tradition as a whole: the attitude of ‘intellectualism.’ In line with this attitude, idealism equates knowledge with reality in its fullest sense. It overlooks the fact that knowledge matters because it is part of something that is not knowledge, or at least not reducible to it – what Dewey variously refers to as ‘situation,’ ‘problem,’ or simply ‘experience.’ The next section will clarify a bit further how that relation of thought to non-thought, which constitutes Dewey’s anti-intellectualism, should be understood.

5. Decentering Thought

47 We can now sum up the narrative of the preceding sections. Idealism, in Dewey’s eyes, combines a correct insight with a problematically traditional attitude towards explaining that insight. Idealism is right to connect the power of thought with the specifically human contribution to experience. This insight allows idealism to acknowledge that the products of intelligence are not simply given, but made. The concepts we use, the categories through which we experience, the norms we are bound to – they all contribute to experience. Thus, our understanding of the world and of ourselves profits from reflecting upon that human contribution; we might think here about Kant’s dismissal of certain question as simply wrongly put. Yet this reflexivity, Dewey argues, is essentially a practical problem, which cannot be explained away via a

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logical or conceptual schematisation. Idealism remains ‘intellectualist’ insofar as it believes that this reflexivity is something which itself needs to be established in terms of knowledge.

48 Granted, the terminology Dewey uses to tell that story can at times be a bit misleading. In particular, the charge of ‘intellectualism’ evokes an opposition to the classical understanding of rationality, whereas Dewey is actually aiming at its defense. Dewey’s position should not be confused with the general vitalist distrust of concepts, such as that which can be sometimes found in James.13 On the contrary, Dewey believes firmly in the power of knowledge to guide actions and to secure valuable practices. Dewey’s point is not to dismiss rationality, but rather to insist that rational thought is constitutively bound to that which his not thought.

49 In this final section, I will add some clarifying remarks to that central idea, which will complete this survey of Dewey’s charge against idealism. For Dewey, the power of thought cannot be explained only by reference to the human contribution alone. Such an explanation also has to focus on what we could call the ‘differential nature’ of thinking, which denies that there are any stable and final identities both of thought and of human nature.

50 We can introduce this idea by recalling that thinking is, for Dewey, always a response to what he calls a ‘problematic situation.’ The term ‘problematic’ has an irreducible existential aspect. A problematic situation is not just something puzzling, but an experience of “tension,” of being full of “doubts” or of being unsure how to proceed (cf. LW 12: 109). It is an experience of incompatible ways of continuing action (LW 4: 189). Therefore, the problematic quality of a ‘situation’ is to be understood temporally. It expresses that there is something at stake insofar as the further development of the situation is unsure and calls for a resolution.

51 This problematic situation, now, is not just the negligible origin of thinking or its cause; it also constitutes its “working context” (MW 6: 88) from which intellectualism abstracts. Thinking, for Dewey, does its work by introducing directed changes to that specific individual situation. It is related to that situation in an essential way, in the same way the organism is constitutively related to its environment. Organic interaction establishes a pattern which “foreshadows” this operative scheme of rational thought, as Dewey claims (LW 12: 40).

52 But while changing the environment is something every organism does, thinking constitutes a distinct way to interact with the situation. First of all, it is an indirect response, which first restrains from immediate and spontaneous action in favor of the right solution (LW 4: 180). Secondly, as a response, it includes the responding subject itself as a contributing factor to the situation (LW 4: 185f.). Both aspects are linked together. What is inquired into is how our own possible contributions to the situation might, in their consequences, change the situation.

53 As Godfrey-Smith (2016) points out, the change instituted by thought might be restricted to a change in our mere understanding of some elements of the situation. It does not need to be a physical external change. To use Godfrey-Smith’s own nicely suggestive example: Once we understand how to crack a nutshell open, its contents become immediately accessible to us, even if we do not go any further and leave the nut itself untouched. What matters is the new potential found by thinking. But note also that this description of change still conforms to Dewey’s claim that his theory

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“introduces no elements save such as are public, observable, and verifiable” (LW 4: 182). If we claim that we have understood something, this claim has to manifest itself in our actions, i.e. in the way we treat nuts or in the way we talk about them. In sum, thinking results in organizing experience in a different way, which in turn manifests itself in ways of acting. New possibilities present themselves, previous impasses fade away.

54 Thinking, then, is constitutively dependent on this ‘working context’ in which thinking is called for. An important consequence of this claim is that we do not always think. We are living an organic and habitual life, in which thought is an option, but not a permanent reality. However, there is, Dewey adds, a possibility to foster thinking by cultivating doubt and creative imagination: “The scientific attitude is that which is capable of enjoying the doubtful” (LW 4: 182). In any case, thoughtful inquiry is only one possible response to a doubtful situation, other possibilities being, for example, direct emotional or habitual responses (cf. LW 4: 180f.). Furthermore, since thinking is the most indirect and most open type of response, it is not necessarily superior to other, more spontaneous reactions.

55 Yet there is a reason why thinking, for us, seems to be so ubiquitous and so pervasive. We are accustomed to thinking as the preferred way to treat problems, since we live in a world which is itself formed by thought. The ordinary world is replete with products of thought; thought is embodied in tools, signs, language, institutions and practices. Yet these products of thought, again, are not themselves forms of thought. They are used by thought because of their consequences and their acquired logical form, for they have proven to be useful in one way or the other. But the often quite seamless process of their application, its ordinary effectiveness, is an experiential fact and cannot be taken for granted. Every new instance of their application might prove that our conception of these tools and concepts was wrong, or partial, or incomplete.

56 Thus, the relative ease and prevalence of everyday thinking is the product of our acculturation into a human environment which is formed by thought, but which is not identical with it. The problematic situations we commonly encounter, as well as the available means of response, belong to an encompassing set of compatible intellectual and normative relations embodied in our culture. They are the historical result of continuous and related changes being made to the human environment. We do not begin anew in each problematic situation; we define, tackle and change it with more or less established concepts and instruments. Thinking is “re-organization” (LW 1: 61), as Dewey aptly puts it, and not a magical intervention ex machina.

57 Taken this way, another aspect of thought’s constitutive ties to that what is not thought comes to the fore. The very process of thinking, according to Dewey, requires the introduction of factors ‘external’ to thought. This refers to habits, concepts, or material tools which allow us to introduce concrete changes in experience. Dewey discusses these factors in his Logic, under the heading of the “matrix of inquiry” (LW 12: 7-102). They establish the wider context out of which inquiry grows, and, more importantly, on which inquiry has to draw in order to do its continuous work.

58 The functional necessity of such a ‘matrix of inquiry’ is particularly evident with respect to the historically accumulated materials just referred to. In order to effectively transform the problematic situation, thinking has to intervene in the course of events by introducing materials which are not yet part of the situation. The problem being exactly that the given situation does not resolve itself on its own, any conscious attempt to

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make sense of the situation has to introduce such ‘external’ material. This material connects the problematic situations with reliable, already existent ways of interaction, thus re-integrating the elements of the situation into a wider, historical context. In Dewey’s own example, a certain “speck of light” in the telescope of the astronomer is identified as a star, and thus receives a new intellectual treatment.14 Such an introduction of ‘external’ conceptual and material tools allows to approach the problematic situations in new determinate ways.

59 But the dependency of thought on ‘external’ tools, concepts and material, also applies the other way around. For Dewey, the material used has no ultimately fixed meaning. Its use is, essentially, experimental. We expect it to do some work, but it might turn out otherwise. Thus, the repeated use of the material used does not leave them untouched as a means of reflection. In re-using existing concepts or instruments, we also learn something new about their individual power. We learn to differentiate their use or to limit our understanding of their potential: “use re-shapes the prior materials” (LW 1: 217). Therefore, thought’s differential relation to non-thought is not only a condition of the possibility of the operation of thinking itself. It is also a condition of the possibility of changing thought, by changing its instruments, habits and ways of acting.

6. Conclusion

60 Our exposition of Dewey’s differentiated position towards idealism comes to a close. For the purposes of this paper, the short outline of Dewey’s positive understanding of ‘thinking,’ as it has been just presented, will suffice to illustrate the main point. We have seen how thought is constitutively bounded to that which is not thought. Thought, first of all, is temporally bounded. It is a response to the situated experience that something is wrong. Furthermore, the results of that process of thinking can be anticipated, but they cannot be taken for granted; they have to be realized. Thought, secondly, is materially bounded, insofar as this activity requires tools, practices and habits that are already available. This ‘external’ material is necessary to introduce new possibilities for acting and thinking in the specific situation. Both dimensions are joined in the historic process of refinement, further articulation and the subsequent differentiation of thinking. Tool ‘use’ is always ‘re-use’; the used tools themselves are re-shaped by their subsequent use in novel situations. Thought, to sum up, is experientially bounded, insofar as the problematic situation creates the relevant frame of reference within which thought has to find an answer.

61 All of these points support Dewey’s rejection of what he considers the ‘intellectualism’ at the heart of the idealist tradition. His main point is that the intellectual relation to the world, and ‘knowing’ in particular, constitute just one kind of interaction with the world among others. Moreover, knowledge only has a specific value because of this difference. Knowledge, Dewey explains, is a “differential term.” Its meaning is defined by the contrast it has to that which is not knowledge – such as “ungrounded conviction,” “mere guess-work” or “the [practical] inexpertness that accompanies lack of familiarity” (MW 6: 112). Likewise, thought only stands out in comparison to other ways of responding to a problematic situation.

62 We are now in a position to finally formulate an answer to our initial question. How ‘idealistic’ is Dewey’s philosophy, and why should we care? Dewey’s philosophy is ‘idealistic,’ we can say, insofar as it acknowledges what I have been calling, following

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Dewey, the ‘human contribution’ to all experience. There is no experience, no value, no knowledge without a contribution from the human mind. At the same time, we can add, Dewey departs from idealism by criticizing it for treating that dependency in merely intellectualist ways.

63 But why should we care about Dewey’s distinctive treatment of idealism, and of intellectualism in general? In what sense is it important to discuss idealism’s ‘human contribution’? Because it is, in its core, a discussion of freedom. In this concluding section, I am not able to expand that claim more thoroughly (see Volbers 2018 for a more elaborated defense). But I hope it has become clear that Dewey’s criticism of intellectualism is not just extending the list of factors which constitute human thought and experience. It further expresses the claim that only such an anti-intellectualist treatment of the relation of thought and experience is the right way to keep thinking open and reflectively sensitive to change. Understanding the ‘human contribution’ implies to understand that our specific contribution to experience, our culture, ideals and cognition, can never be spelled out in a final manner. There is no ultimate, culture- transcending answer to the question what ‘we’ are and what ‘we’ can become, because the meanings of our acts and practices continuously intertwine and shift in the course of time. Thus, according to Dewey, the most rational way of self-understanding is to remain open for change. Not only scientific norms and practices, but also our own self- understanding should be, in that sense, fallible.

64 Such an openness to change now is, for Dewey, a necessary condition for freedom. Remember that ‘thinking,’ in Dewey’s use of the term, denotes more than just formal deduction and epistemological knowledge. It ranges from historical inquiry to formal logic, it includes works of art as well as ordinary attempts of conscious and political action. A change in thinking, then, is in a fundamental way a change in who and what we are. This is where, for Dewey, freedom resides: “We are not free because of what we statically are, but inasfar as we are becoming different from what we have been” (LW 3: 108). This understanding of freedom is also the basis of Dewey’s conception of democracy as a way of life. According to Dewey, democratic freedom is a social and cultural constellation which leaves as much room as possible to the diverse forms and the continuous reworking of experience: “Democracy is the faith that the process of experience is more important than any special result attained” (LW 14: 228).

65 Dewey’s claim about freedom, thus, can be seen as an expression of the wish to leave the answer to the question ‘What are we?’ open to experience. This is definitely not a comforting wish. But it succeeds, at least in my opinion, in reclaiming the idea that precisely because thinking is a difference that makes a difference, philosophical and non-philosophical forms of thought do matter. These practices and their norms do contribute to our possibilities of living, to the better and to the worse, and thus are rightly conceived of as objects of further criticism and reflection.

66 Ultimately, the possibilities of changing our ways of thinking, and the responsibility resulting from such possibilities, should not be evaded. Neither by reducing thought to a mere form without practical relevance or footing, nor by passing its development over to speculative metaphysics on a grand scale. By decentering thought, Dewey is centering it once again on its importance and relevance.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

ADORNO Theodor W. & Max HORKHEIMER, (2016), Dialectic of Enlightenment, London, New York, Verso.

BERNSTEIN Richard, (2013), “Hegel and Pragmatism,” in Alan Malachowski (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Pragmatism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 105-23.

BLOOR David, (2017), “The Question of Linguistic Idealism Revisited,” in David Stern & (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, Cambridge, New York, Cambridge University Press, 354-82.

CAVELL Stanley, (1979), Claim of Reason, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

CAVELL Stanley, (2004), Cities of Words. Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

CONANT James, (2012), “Two Varieties of Skepticism,” Rethinking Epistemology, 2 (edited by Günter Abel & James Conant), 1-73.

DREYFUS Hubert L., (2006), “Overcoming the Myth of the Mental,” Topoi, 25 (1-2), 43-9.

EMUNDTS Dina, (2013), “Idealism and Pragmatism: The Inheritance of Hegel’s Concept of Experience,” in Nicholas Boyle, Liz Disley, & (eds.), The Impact of Idealism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 347-72.

GILADI Paul, (2017), “Idealism and the Metaphysics of Individuality,” Philosophy & Social Criticism, 43 (2), 208-29.

GODFREY-SMITH Peter, (2016), “Dewey and the Question of Realism,” Noûs, 50 (1), 73-89.

HAUGELAND John, (1998), Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.

HILDEBRAND David, (2003), Beyond Realism and Antirealism: John Dewey and the Neopragmatists, The Vanderbilt Library of American Philosophy, Nashville, Vanderbilt University Press.

HORSTMANN Rolf-Peter, (1999), “What Is Hegel’s Legacy and What Should We Do With It?,” European Journal of Philosophy, 7 (2), 275-87.

HORSTMANN Rolf-Peter, (2004), Die Grenzen der Vernunft. Eine Untersuchung zu Zielen und Motiven des Deutschen Idealismus, 3rd ed., Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann.

MACINTYRE Alasdair, (2002), Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the , 2nd ed., Chicago and La Salle, Open Court Publishing Company.

MCDOWELL John, (1996), Mind and World: With a New Introduction, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.

MOUNCE Howard O., (2005), “Wittgenstein and Classical Realism,” in Danièle Moyal-Sharrock & William H. Brenner (eds.), Readings of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 103-21.

PINKARD Terry, (2002), German Philosophy 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

PINKARD Terry, (2007), “Was Pragmatism the Successor to Idealism?,” in Cheryl Misak (ed.), New Pragmatists, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 142-68.

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PIPPIN Robert B., (1989), Hegel’s Idealism : The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

RORTY Richard, (1979), Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton, Press.

SHOOK John R. & James A. GOOD, (2010), John Dewey’s Philosophy of Spirit: With the 1897 Lecture on Hegel, 1st ed., American Philosophy, New York, Fordham University Press.

STERN Robert, (2005), “Peirce on Hegel: Nominalist or Realist?,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 41 (1), 65-99.

STERN Robert, (2007), “Hegel, British Idealism, and the Curious Case of the Concrete Universal,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 15 (1), 115-53.

STERN Robert, (2011), “Hegel and Pragmatism,” in Stephen Houlgate & Michael Baur (eds.), A Companion to Hegel, Wiley‐Blackwell, 556-75.

VOLBERS Jörg, (2018), Die Vernunft der Erfahrung. Eine pragmatistische Kritik der Rationalität, Hamburg, Meiner.

WILLIAMS Bernard, (1973), “Wittgenstein and Idealism,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, 7, 76-95.

WITTGENSTEIN Ludwig, (1967), Philosophical Investigations, 2nd ed. reprinted, Oxford, Blackwell.

NOTES

1. Following the convention, all quotes from Dewey are taken from the Collected Works, ed. by Jo Ann Boyston, Carbondale. 2. For a much more detailed defense of this thesis, see Volbers 2018. 3. Cf. Dewey’s description of the organism as a means to establish constant meaning in a constantly changing environment (LW 12: 37). 4. Dewey’s example is fire (cf. LW 1: 181f.). Already treating it as an object of worship is a form of thinking, limited as it is. 5. For a good description of classical realism, though with respect to Wittgenstein, see Mounce 2005. 6. Cf. the figure of ‘the skeptic’ in Cavell’s Claim of Reason (1979). One telling example of Dewey’s rather generalizing treatment of idealism can be found in his Brief Studies of Realism. After claiming that idealism has made the “ubiquity of [the knowledge] relationship its axiom,” he quotes Bain (!) as evidence. Dewey takes this single quotation to be fully representative of idealism in general: “One sample is as good as a thousand” (MW 6: 112). Later discussions, such as in Experience and Nature or Quest for Certainty, are somewhat more detailed, but serve only to reinforce his previous judgment. 7. The 1897 lectures (Shook & Good 2010) show that Dewey actually had good knowledge of idealism and in particular of Hegel, and that it was quite modern and ‘non-metaphysical,’ as the editors of that volume point out. 8. For a detailed reconstruction of Dewey’s debate with contemporary idealists, which focuses on that claim, see Hildebrand (2003: 30-87). 9. A contemporary version of this idealistic vision can be found in McDowell (1996: 118): “the world is where the human being is, where she is at home.” A recurring problem is, of course, how much negativity is allowed, to make some room for internal disruption and development, but without breaking that basic relation. Hegel’s speculative metaphysics can be seen as the attempt

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to allow as much negativity as possible while still holding fast to the basic claim of an ‘identity’ in all differences (cf. Stern 2007; Giladi 2017). 10. Horstmann reconstructs the history of idealism on this premise; he calls it the “Aufklärungsthese” (Horstmann, 2004: 27) – the thesis of enlightenment. Pinkard’s (2002) reconstruction highlights the Kantian idea of unconditioned moral autonomy as a driving force in the development of German idealism. 11. Incidentally, this is also the power of language, as Wittgenstein (1967) argues. , thus, has always had a strong affinity to idealism (Williams 1973; Bloor 2017). 12. Quoted from Cavell (2004: 128), who sees that statement as expressing “[the] idea of the human as a burden to itself.” 13. Cf. MW 6: 86-91, where Dewey separates his avowed ‘anti-intellectualism’ from James’s, and also LW 1: 49. 14. Dewey uses this astronomical example in LW 8: 238; cf. also LW 1: 115.

ABSTRACTS

The article presents Dewey’s own understanding of rationality by reconstructing his criticism of idealism. For Dewey, idealism is an important and valuable expression of the modern idea that both knowledge and values are historical products of human self-determination. Thus, it rightly defends the power of thought against the uncritical claims of mere religious and social authority. Yet idealism, Dewey claims, still misconceives that human power by ultimately treating it as a merely intellectual power, thus following the philosophical tradition. For Dewey, however, human thought and reasoning have to be understood in a much broader way. Dewey decenters thought by arguing that it is a natural, dependent and essentially temporal process, in which the intellectual elements only play a subordinate role. Thought, he claims, does not only have a history; furthermore, thinking only matters to human beings precisely because it is open to reflective change. Dewey’s position, thus, can be seen as an attempt to preserve the existential importance of philosophical self-reflection by binding thought to history and change in a radical way.

AUTHOR

JÖRG VOLBERS

Freie Universität Berlin joerg[at]joergvolbers.de

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Voluntarism A Difference that Makes the Difference between German Idealism and American Pragmatism?

Daniel J. Brunson

1. Introduction

1 The relation between (German) Idealism and (American) Pragmatism is complex, as both are better seen as traditions with their own internal tensions or even outright contradictions rather than fully-codified sets of doctrines. This is obvious from the debates between Left and Right Wing Hegelians, or from Peirce’s famous re-christening of his position as pragmaticism, “[…] which is ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers” (CP 5.414). I put the demonyms in parentheses because, while the founders and key proponents were German or American, each were international movements. For example, the American , Brit Francis Herbert Bradley, and Italian Benedetto Croce, among others, continued and developed the tradition of German Idealism, while German-born Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller and Italian Giovanni Papini aligned themselves with American Pragmatism.1 On the other hand, we should expect some commonalities between each tradition due to mutual influence, though the preponderance of influence is probably from the German Idealists to the American Pragmatists simply because of timing, as exemplified by John Dewey’s “permanent Hegelian deposit.”2 More broadly, we can see each tradition as motivated by similar concerns, such as reconceptualizing the human in light of the sceptical culmination of modern philosophy in and the success of the physical sciences.3

2 What, then, might we say about the relation between idealism and pragmatism in light of these complications, as well as others not mentioned?4 In this paper I propose one promising line of inquiry into this question: an examination of the philosophy of Josiah Royce. Royce was one of the first four philosophy Ph.D’s from Johns Hopkins University, and trained in Germany in the 1870s. He engaged deeply with the thought of his Harvard colleague William James and with that of Charles Peirce, as well as with the history of philosophy and religion more broadly. In particular, in his late masterwork The Problem of Christianity, Royce called his position Absolute Pragmatism.

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This may seem a contradictio in adiecto, but as James Cotton (1954: 11) argued “[…] the most important point […] in the work of Royce lies in the union between idealism and pragmatism in his thought.” This suggests at least two things. First, that, regardless of his success, Royce thought idealism and pragmatism could be unified. This is a small point in favor of those who think pragmatism is, in some sense, an outgrowth of idealism, in that an offshoot might be dialectically re-absorbed by the whole. Second, and this is the side I emphasize, Royce’s efforts to synthesize idealism and pragmatism suggests that there is something right about pragmatism that idealism lacks. And what might this be? A bit later in The Problem of Christianity Royce (1913: 293) calls his philosophy Absolute Voluntarism: In its most general form, this philosophy to which I myself adhere, asserts that, while every metaphysical theory is the expression of an attitude of the will, there is one, and but one, general and decisive attitude of the will which is the right attitude, when we stand in presence of the universe, and when we undertake to choose how we propose to bear ourselves towards the world.

3 The “one general and decisive attitude of the will” is the Absolute part of Royce’s doctrine, while “every metaphysical theory is the expression of an attitude of the will” is the Voluntarism part, which Royce says the pragmatists are right about. In other words, for Royce Voluntarism is “[…] the spirit of pragmatism, as James defined it” (ibid.: 291).5 Furthermore, as Mahowald (1972: 14) argues, “[…] voluntarism is the key to the distinction between Royce and the speculative idealists.” Might it thereby also be the key to the distinction between pragmatism and idealism?

4 Of course, this raises the question of the relation between pragmatism and voluntarism. However, I think this is a fruitful complication, because it is clear that commentators at the turn of the twentieth century also thought the key issue between idealism and pragmatism was the question of intellectualism or voluntarism. Accordingly, this paper will now turn to a survey of Royce’s conception of idealism and the development of his voluntarism, especially through his engagement with Peirce, James, and Dewey. Additionally, we will explore some of the authors who weighed in the importance of voluntarism as a distinct feature of pragmatism. The upshot will be that voluntarism, while itself a contested term, was seen as a fundamental difference between idealism and pragmatism, and one of (semi-)independent origin.6 While I make no pretense at resolving the debate about the relation between idealism and pragmatism here, I do hope to show the promise of voluntarism as a more concrete topic for further inquiry.7

2. Royce’s Early Pragmatism: Correcting Kant

5 In 1881 Royce gave a talk at a Kant centennial on “Kant’s Relation to Modern Philosophic Progress,” published later that year in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy.8 This talk comes ten years after Peirce’s early articulation of what will be called the pragmatic maxim in his 1871 “Review of Fraser’s Berkeley,” and three years after its presentation in the Popular Science Monthly series, especially “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.”9 Royce’s address also comes two years after James’ “Sentiment of Rationality,” and a year before he joined Harvard as a sabbatical replacement for James; for example, it includes two complimentary references to James’ concept of a spatial quale (Royce, 1881: 376). However, Royce’s focus is squarely on Kant of the first Kritik, rather than some nascent form of pragmatism. The paper has two main sections: first, a survey of whether any post-Kantian ontology is successful; and second, finding that none are

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successful, Royce’s suggestion for “[…] a direct development of the Kantian thought” (ibid.: 361).

6 Royce sees monism, in its variety of forms, as the dominant ontology of the nineteenth century. He quickly dispenses with both materialist and mentalist (e.g., William Clifford’s Mind-Stuff) atomic , as no aggregate can achieve the unity of consciousness: “Consciousness, then, as a continual synthesis of innumerable elements into the unity of active judgment is more than an aggregate, and can never be explained as an aggregate of elementary atoms of sensation” (Royce, 1881: 364-5). Thus, materialist atomic monism is doubly mistaken, for it also cannot explain the origin of mind. As atomism fails, he turns to “[…] the numerous efforts that see in the world the expression of psychical powers as such, not mere mind-stuff atoms, but organized wholes […]” (ibid.: 366). Again, he sees two broad classes of monism: Logical and Alogical. Hegel exemplifies the former, though he goes unnamed here, as the Panlogical Monist, who “[…] conceives the world as a process whereby the world-spirit makes actual what was potential, and the world-history therefore as an Evolution” (ibid.). Why must there be evolution, though? Why does the Logos not simply actualize the perfection it already contains? Furthermore, there is the pessimistic critique of Schopenhauer’s Alogical monism, wherein despite its evolution towards perfection the world is almost wholly marked by imperfection: “We mortals know of no one point in the universe where one might lay his hand and say: Here the ideal is attained” (ibid.: 368). However, Royce dismisses Schopenhauer’s Alogical Monism even more swiftly, as he think it lacks even a consistent statement.10 Here I take Royce to mean not a particular failure of Schopenhauer’s writing, but rather the general difficulty in articulating rational claims about the irrationality of everything. Thus, for Royce Alogical Monism is a non-starter, while Panlogical Monism faces difficulties further down the line.

7 Even if a version of Panlogical Monism could be established that is not internally inconsistent, “[…] the terrible passage through the gates of the Kantian Dialektik would remain for each […] The great problems of the theory of knowledge would demand solution” (Royce, 1881: 370). Kant’s solution is unsatisfactory, for commonly expressed reasons (e.g., the particulars of the relation between the form and matter of appearances), and so Royce (ibid.: 378) offers his own modification of Kantianism: The view here maintained is that the past , instead of being picked up, as it were, by the synthesis of apprehension and recognition, and carried bodily into the present consciousness, are really projected out of the present data, into the conceived past, by the momentary activity of judgment […] Our view would make all the world of reality immediately subject to a unity implied in the present act by which this world is projected from the present into a conceived but not given infinite space and time.

8 Royce distinguishes three classes of conscious acts of projection from present data: Acknowledgement of the Past, Anticipations (of the future), and Acknowledgement of a Universe of Truth (reference to external reality and other minds). Understanding the past, future, and external reality as a projection from present data by an act of consciousness eliminates “[t]he three imposters of the Kantian Kritik (imposters because they so well deceived Kant himself), whose names are Ding an sich, transcendentaler Gegenstand, and ” (ibid.: 379).11 Although not put explicitly in these terms, this triple act of projection seems to be an act of the will, and so we can see this as an early expression of Royce’s voluntarism. Royce’s tenth and final postulate of the “true critical theory of Reality” makes the connection a little clearer:

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The goal of philosophy can only be reached in an Ethical Doctrine. For since the ultimate fact of the knowing consciousness is the active construction of a world of truth from the data of sense, the ultimate justification of this activity must be found in the significance – i.e., in the moral worth – of this activity itself, a matter only to be discussed in the light of Ethics. (Royce, 1881: 380)

9 If this is still not clear enough, Royce’s 1903 American Philosophical Association Presidential Address, published in 1904 in The Philosophical Review, asserts that under his own understanding of his intellectual development this youthful correction to Kant is thoroughly pragmatist, in that it makes even the most basic functions of cognition actions bound by ethical norms: It was a mere sketch. But since it expressed a sincere effort to state the theory of truth wholly in terms of an interpretation of our judgments as present acknowledgements, since it made these judgment as embodiments of conscious attitudes that I then conceived to be essentially ethical, and to be capable of no restatement in terms of any absolute warrant whatever, I may assert that, for a time at least, I did seriously struggle not only to be what is now a pragmatist, but also to escape falling into the clutches of any Absolute. (Royce, 1904: 117)

10 In the intervening years Royce seemingly did fall into the clutches of an Absolute, while also striving to maintain his early commitment to pragmatism/voluntarism. He published numerous essays and several major works during this period, and here I will highlight some aspects of two: The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885) and The World and the Individual (1899-1901). In particular, during this period we see some of Peirce’s criticisms of Royce speak directly to the question of voluntarism.

3. Peirce and Royce: Increasing Appreciation for Secondness

11 The Religious Aspect of Philosophy features, among other positions, one of Royce’s governing insights: a transcendental proof of the Absolute from the possibility of error. First, that there is error is an experiential fact. Error is the failure of an idea to represent its object. But how is an error known to be an error? The mind must have an idea of the intended object along with the misrepresented object. Kelly Parker (2008: 112) gives a concrete example: “If I think that my keys are on the hall table, but discover that my idea is erroneous, I do not conclude that my keys never existed as the object of my thought. Rather, I focus on an idea that I had all along – that my keys do definitely exist somewhere. They are the true object of an idea, and an object which is at the moment available to me only imperfectly.”12 This is a higher order idea, that for Royce eventually concatenates into an all-inclusive Absolute Thought (Royce, 1885: 426).

12 Royce argues that this Infinite Thought must be actual, rejecting the view of ‘Thrasymachus’ that “[…] if all were known to an all-knower, he would judge error to be mistaken.” In his review of this volume Peirce recognizes himself as this “Royce- forsaken Thrasymachus” and makes a remark especially relevant to our current inquiry: “[…] the Hegelian school does not sufficiently take into account the volitional account of cognition” (CP 8.41). Peirce continues by arguing that Royce neglects recent developments in logic (a common refrain in their relationship), especially the indispensable function of an index in designating the subject of a proposition. More generally, on Peirce’s view Royce neglects Secondness as Will: “The element of feeling

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is so prominent in sensations, that we do not observe that something like Will enters into them, too” (CP 8.41).13 Will is the outward variety of polar consciousness, and “[t]he capital error of Hegel which permeates his whole system in every part of it is that he almost altogether ignores the Outward Clash” (CP 8.42).14 Thus, we can see Peirce as offering a voluntarististic corrective to Royce’s intellectualist Hegelianism.15

13 Peirce’s review was unpublished, and his relationship with Royce would sour shortly afterwards due to Peirce taking Francis Ellingwood Abbot’s side in his quarrel with Royce.16 Indeed, Peirce’s criticism of Royce’s argument from error seems to have made little impact, for as Kelly Parker (2008: 116) notes “[Royce] continues to present it, in its original form, until the end of his career.” Furthermore, Royce does not mention Peirce as an influence in 1892’s The Spirit of Modern Philosophy. Their relationship improves, however, with Royce acknowledging the influence of Peirce’s “brilliant cosmological essays” (the Monist Series culminating in 1893’s “Evolutionary Love”) in 1895’s “Self- Consciousness, Social Consciousness, and Nature II” (602). Conversely, in 1897 Peirce approvingly notes that with Royce’s introduction of individual wills into his system in 1895’s The Conception of God “a seed of death […] [was] implanted in the Hegelian system.”17 Again, we see Peirce suggesting that a larger interest in, or proper understanding of, the Will improves Royce’s system.

14 Royce was greatly impressed by Peirce’s 1898 Cambridge Lectures, and again acknowledges Peirce’s influence in his The World and the Individual. While not made explicit, we can perhaps see some of Royce’s debt to Peirce in the following account of his development from the preface of Volume I: In my first book [The Religious Aspect of Philosophy] the conception of the Absolute was defined in such wise as led me then to prefer, quite deliberately, the use of the term Thought as the best name for the final unity of the Absolute. While this term was there so defined as to make Thought inclusive of Will and of Experience, these latter terms were not emphasize prominently enough, and the aspects of the Absolute Life with they denote have since become more central in my own interest. (Royce, 1900: ix)

15 Royce fulfills this promise to see the Absolute as more than Thought in at least two ways in The World and the Individual. The first is his definition of ideas as essentially purposes: “Whatever else our ideas are, and however much or little they may be, at any moment, expressed in rich, sensuous imagery, it is certain that they are ideas not because they are masses of series of images, but because they embody present conscious purposes. Every idea is as much a volitional process as it is an intellectual process” (ibid.: 310-1). In other words, the correspondence to its object that makes an idea true or false is not similarity, as in a photograph looking like the person photographed, but rather in the fulfillment or frustration of the embodied purpose. “When I have an idea of the world, my idea is a will, and the world of my idea is simply my own will itself determinately embodied” (ibid.: 327). Second, Royce combines this reconceptualization of ideas with his argument from error to provide a non-Hegelian conception of the Absolute, one that Royce does not hesitate to call God: “In him, namely, and as sharing in his perfect Will, my will comes consciously to find wherein lies precisely what satisfies my will, and so makes my life, this unique life, distinct from all other lives” (Royce, 1901: 435). In other words, now the final unity of the Absolute is a unity of Willing, not only Knowing.

16 The influence of Peirce on Royce deepens after 1900, leading to a further reconstruction of Royce’s Absolute as a Universal Community of Interpretation in

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1913’s The Problem of Christianity. However, these developments are commonly seen to come from engagement with Peirce’s logic conceived as semeiotic rather than more specific voluntarist corrections to Royce’s Hegelian tendencies.18 Indeed, there Royce asserts that he now owes more to Peirce than anything he might have owed to Hegel over the years (Royce, 1913: I.xi-xii).19 Furthermore, what his critics see as a Hegelian logic Royce sees as Peircean, and thereby both independent and more general than Hegel’s logic (ibid.: II.184-5). In this way Royce’s critics (and here James is probably at the foremost of Royce’s mind) have some justification for their confusion of Hegel and Peirce. H. G. Townsend argues that Peirce and Hegel are closer than even Royce admits. So why does Royce side with Peirce? Because of “[…] one respect in which the difference between Peirce and Hegel is fundamental and significant. Peirce’s mind leans hard toward voluntarism” (Townsend, 1928: 301). Townsend sees this both in the Peircean account of interpretation Royce gives in The Problem of Christianity as well as the role of agency in his logic, especially System Σ.20 Thus, while Peirce is not the sole voluntarist influence on Royce, he might have been the decisive one: “I have no doubt that this is the secret of [Royce’s] confessed indebtedness to Peirce. Peirce taught him how to find a place for the will in a universe of Hegelian absolutes” (Townsend, 1928: 302).

17 I do not mean to suggest that Peirce is a radical voluntarist, for Secondness is only one of three irreducible categories present to varying degrees in all phenomena, so the “Will” is not simply Secondness. Furthermore, I take seriously his reminder about the formulation of pragmatic maxim in “How to Make Our Ideas Clear”: “This employment five times over of derivatives of concipere must then have had a purpose […] One was to show that I was speaking of meaning in no sense that that of intellectual purport” (CP 5.402 Fn P3).21 Nonetheless, balancing intellectualism and voluntarism is perhaps part of why Peirce and Royce came to see each other as philosophically kindred spirits. Of course, Peirce was not the only pragmatist offering voluntarist insights to Royce, so let us now turn to James.

4. James and Royce: Engaging with Experimental Psychology

18 Again, in 1904 Royce saw his 1881 Kant paper as an expression of a ‘pure pragmatism’: “I was then twenty-six years old and had been deeply influenced by Professor James’s earlier lectures and essays” (Royce, 1904: 117). Given this early date, James’ original 1879 version of “Sentiment of Rationality” is likely the key text.22 Of course, by 1904 James’ “Will to Believe” further influenced Royce. However, even more so than between Royce and Peirce, detailing all of the interactions between James and Royce is a monumental task. Fortunately, this task has been undertaken by scholars such as Clendenning, Oppenheim, Kegley, and Auxier, so I need not repeat all of it here.23 In short, the continual debate between James and Royce led James to intensify his commitment to empiricism and pluralism, if anything, while Royce maintained his own commitment to some form of Absolutism. While we will see some more of Royce’s critique of James below, here I want to focus on suggestion by Auxier (2013: 102): “This is a feature of Royce’s thought that is often overlooked – that is voluntarism, while often stated as a fundamental postulate when he does metaphysics, is based upon an empirical psychology.” Thus, rather than rehearsing a fairly well known story about

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James and Royce’s inability to convert each other, let us look a little more closely at their shared background in psychology.

19 In addition to the influence of the early James, by 1881 Royce had studied psychology with .24 Widely regarded as the father of psychology, Wundt was deeply influenced by Leibniz, and he produced a variety of philosophical works, such as his 1886 Ethik.25 Significantly for our present inquiry, Wundt argued for what is now called psychological voluntarism. For Wundt, consciousness originates in sensation. However, sensations are always already presented as representations that, if considered as representing external reality, are perceptions. Conscious awareness might also be more or less broad, and Wundt calls perceptions in the “focal point” of consciousness apperceptions. Obviously, this is a precursor to James’ “focus” and “fringe.”26 However, perceptions do not transform into apperceptions passively, but rather through an act of attending or will: “[…] the act of apperception in every case consists in an inner act of will” (Wundt, 1880: I.34). This act of will provides the unity of apperception, in contrast to seemingly intellectual act of synthesis via the categories in Kant’s account.27 In addition, as apperceptions are also representations, ideas, at least insofar as we are aware of them, are products of the will.

20 In the The World and the Individual Royce (1901: I.23) says: “[…] an idea appears in consciousness as having the significance of an act of will.” Indeed, Royce holds this position as early as 1882’s “How Beliefs are Made”: “When impressions are modified by attention […] [which], in its most elementary forms, is the same activity that, in a more developed shape, we commonly call will. We attend to one thing rather than another, because we will to do so, and our will is here the elementary impulse to know” (Royce, 1920: 345).28 Thus, while Royce was influenced by James (who was 13 years Royce’s senior) from early on, this was in part because of their shared background in voluntaristic experimental psychology, especially concerning the role of attention in cognition. For example, from James’ “Attention” chapter in The Principles of Psychology: “The practical and theoretical life of whole species, as well as of individual beings, results from the selection which the habitual direction of their attention involves […] Suffice it meanwhile that each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of a universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit” (James, 1890: I.424). Replace ‘chooses’ with ‘projects’ and we have something much like the position Royce held since his Kant address. Nonetheless, Royce and James are typically seen as philosophical opponents, despite this shared background. Why so? One reason is James’ combination of voluntarist psychology with “the principle of Peirce” to develop his own form of pragmatism, conceived as both a method for clarifying ideas and as a theory of truth. Royce rebuts with an Absolute Voluntarism and an Absolute Pragmatism. However, another reason is that Royce, like Peirce, sees James’ pragmatism as too individualistic; not simply in the sense of particular differences made to particular individuals, but in failing to emphasize that individual wills are themselves fundamentally social.29 In his own Outlines of Psychology, Royce substitutes the common distinctions of Feeling, Intellect, and Will with Sensitiveness, Docility, and Initiative, with the ‘will’ playing a role throughout.30 For example, he concludes the section on Sensitiveness (which includes sensations, images, and ) with “[…] the whole consciousness of any moment is an expression of the will of that moment, in so far as that will is concerned with these sensory experiences, and with these objects, in view of the present values which our feelings give to the objects in question” (Royce,

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1903: 196). This is a primordial form of will, or conation more broadly, while the fuller concept of Will can only come after an account of docility, or our ability to learn; in particular, through imitation.31 Through imitation of others we come to develop our individuality and to grow a will of our own through the organization of our desires.32 The need to satisfy more than our individual will does not go away however, even for ‘pure’ pragmatists: “It is the need that I before called the need of companionship, the need not only of thinking for ourselves, but of finding somebody who either will agree with us, or else at least, to our mode of thinking, ought to agree with us” (Royce, 1903: 126).33 Even the pluralist, Royce notes, wants people to agree with him. This felt need for companionship pushes even a pure pragmatist to be more than a pragmatist, and in a variation of Royce’s argument form error culminates in the Absolute – “[a]ll that is practical borrows its truth from the Eternal” (Royce, 1903: 142). Here is Royce’s Absolute Pragmatism, though not yet by that name. What of his Absolute Voluntarism? As with “pragmatism,” Royce adopts (or attempts to co-opt) a newly popular designation for his position.

5. Tufts and Schiller: Naming a Tradition

21 While we have been talking about the voluntarism of the pragmatists, the term “voluntarism” itself arrives comparatively late. For example, the only mention in Peirce’s Collected Papers is an, at best, half-hearted agreement with one of Schiller’s definitions of pragmatism: “[…] a conscious application to epistemology (or logic) of a teleological psychology, which implies, ultimately, a voluntaristic metaphysic” (Schiller, 1912: 12).34 Likewise, Royce does not use the term until his 1908 Address “The Problem of Truth in the Light of Recent Discussion,” republished in 1911’s William James and Other Essays on the .

22 The advent of “voluntarism” as a common term of art appears to be 1901’s Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology. The topic has an entry of two full double-column pages written by James Hayden Tufts, who at this point had been developing the Chicago School of Pragmatism with Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and others, for almost a decade. Here is Tufts’ definition: Voluntarism (in metaphysics) […] The theory that the ultimate nature of reality is to be conceived as some form of will (or conation); contrasted with INTELLECTUALISM (q.v.). (Tufts, 1901: 807; etymology omitted)

23 Tufts goes on to trace these contrasting tendencies in the history of Western philosophy, with the Greeks as intellectualists and Augustine as a voluntarist; in the medieval period Ibn Rushd, Aquinas, and Eckhart were intellectualists, while Ibn Gabirol, Duns Scotus, and William of Occam defended voluntarism. The early modern period is largely intellectualist, with Spinoza as the best representative and Leibniz as attempting a voluntarist correction.35 In contrast, the late modern period shows voluntarism as a growing tendency, rooted in Kant. As for the nineteenth century: “Following Kant, two distinct types of voluntarism have proceeded […] They may be called respectively rational and irrational voluntarism, whose originators were respectively Fichte and Schopenhauer” (Tufts, 1901: 808). Rational voluntarists include Wilhelm Wundt, de Biran (1766-1824), Charles Renouvier (1815-1903), and William James, while Tufts sees Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906) and Friedrich

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Nietzsche as developers of Schopenhauerian irrational voluntarism. Royce does not merit a mention.36

24 Let me say a few things concerning the three less famous names given by Tufts: Renouvier, von Hartmann, and de Biran. First, Renouvier is mostly remembered for inspiring James to believe in . However, Jeremy Dunham (2015: 2) argues the influence is deeper: “[…] what is vital for James about Renouvier’s theory of free will is not the affirmation of its existence, but rather they way Renouvier connects it to his theory of knowledge and psychology of belief.” Significantly, Renouvier was a self- identified idealist, though not a Hegelian, and thereby provided James with resources to reject Absolute Idealism but not idealism tout court. In particular, Renouvier’s idealism offers “[…] a radical voluntarist alternative […]” (ibid.: 6).37 Second, von Hartmann was well known to Peirce, James, and Royce. For example, Peirce writes: “But I do not believe that psychology can be set to until the importance of Hartmann’s argument [that there is unconscious mind] is acknowledged” (CP 7.364). More specifically, for von Hartmann not only is there unconscious mind, “[…] the will in and of itself is under all circumstances unconscious” (1884: II.102). Finally, Biran is at the beginning of a tradition of French Voluntarism, reaching into the thought of , another key influence on James. However, L. Susan Stebbing (1914: 11) argues that while the tradition of French Voluntarism “[…] exhibits in Renouvier an element, which, mingling with the ‘principle of Peirce,’ brings forth the pragmatism of William James, it nevertheless developes [sic] on independent and even antagonistic lines.”38 So here we have another tradition distinct from German Idealism that informs American Pragmatism.

25 Stebbing (1914: 13) offers a useful expansion of Tufts’ definition of “Voluntarism”: Its essential distinction from “Intellectualism” or “Rationalism” may be summed up briefly in that Voluntarism holds that psychologically, will is more fundamental than intellect; that metaphysically, the ultimate nature of reality is some form of will; finally, that in epistemology, will must be recognised as essential to the construction of truth […]39

26 We have already seen more or less qualified forms of each of these voluntarisms. Returning to the provenance of “voluntarism,” Schiller uses the term in his 1903 , which Dewey reviewed in 1904 for The Psychological Bulletin.40 There Dewey makes an equivocation, not unjustly, that helps drive the subsequent uptake of the term: “Voluntarism, now termed Pragmatism, which I should prefer to call , is characteristic of the book throughout” (Dewey, 1904: 335).41 We will return to Dewey’s conception of voluntarism, especially in his understanding of Royce’s philosophy, shortly. For now, let us dwell a little more with some forgotten observers of the debates about pragmatism.

27 For example, in 1905 Alfred Hoernlé argued for the thesis of this present paper: What seems to me to give the conflict between Pragmatism and Absolutism its real importance and significance is that it is but a phase in that wider conflict between Intellectualism and Voluntarism, the roots of which can be traced back to the reaction against the Hegelian Philosophy in Germany in the years 1840-80. (Hoernlé, 1905: 21)

28 In this article Hoernlé takes James Ward’s Gifford Lectures, published in 1899 as Naturalism and Agnosticism, as illustrative of Voluntarism.42 Since Hoernlé sees contemporary Voluntarism as primarily epistemological, he then proceeds to a critical exposition of Bradley’s Absolutist/Intellectualist account of knowledge, truth, and the

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relationship between logic and psychology. This is preparation for a second article on Pragmatism as presented by James and Schiller, which we will focus on here.43 Hoernlé admits his account of pragmatism is debatable because of the absence of a systematic exposition on behalf of its proponents, but again he sees it as primarily a doctrine concerning the nature of truth and knowledge, one that recognizes the seemingly insuperable gap between the Absolute and Appearance. “This takes us to the central doctrine of Pragmatism, which I take to be the insistence on the purposiveness of our whole mental life” (Hoernlé, 1905b: 446). For the Pragmatist, thought is a kind of action, and therefore true beliefs are marked in a similar fashion to successful actions – they are ‘satisfactory’ or ‘work.’ Pragmatism is not a pure , despite the claims of its critics, because ideas are ‘made true’ by a process of experience, not simply by us. “This double-faced nature of truth, as partly revealing itself to us, partly made by us, seems best explained by the willing, purposive element of our nature. It is primarily so far as the world opposes itself to us and check our activities, whether theoretical or practical, that we distinguish ourselves from it” (ibid.: 452).44 Hoernlé sees predecessors of this voluntarism in Descartes and Spinoza – all acts of judgment are acts of will – and also the possibility of bridging the gap between faith and knowledge left by Kant (ibid.: 453; 455). Most significantly for our purposes: I am bold enough to think that the doctrine of the development of a consciousness of self and a consciousnesses of the world, i.e., of a subject and object, in relation and opposition to each other – a doctrine with which Hegelian writers have made us abundantly familiar – could be reconciled with that I hold to be the fundamental point of Pragmatism by the recognition of that self-consciousness as essentially a purposive and willing consciousness. (Ibid.: 455)

29 This paper remains agnostic as to whether Hegel’s account of self-consciousness is essentially, or sufficiently, purposive. Clearly, rehabilitating teleological notions, including the purposiveness of nature, is a major part of Hegel’s project.45 What Hoernlé and other commentators show us is that pragmatism was commonly seen as at least bringing something to idealism, if not opposing it entirely, in arguing for voluntarism over intellectualism. Another example: “Mr. Schiller’s jaunty onslaughts on Kantian apriorism, Bradleian absolutism and all other forms of intellectualism are interesting reading” (Leighton, 1904: 149).46 Thus, when Royce declares in “The Problem of Truth in Light of Recent Discussion” that “[…] the solving word of the theory of truth is Voluntarism” he is self-consciously identifying with a position seen as distinctive of, perhaps even identical with, pragmatism (Royce, 1911: 198). Or, as Royce refers to it repeatedly in this address, instrumentalism. That is, Royce sees the instrumentalism of Dewey, as well as the pragmatism of James, as inspired by a voluntarism he shares with both. And yet, this voluntarism is insufficient if understood as individualistic or relativistic: For what we hereby learn is that all truth is indeed relative to the expression of our will, but that the will inevitably determines for itself forms of activity which are objectively valid and absolute, just because to attempt to inhibit these forms is once more to act, and is to act in accordance with them. (Royce, 1911: 250)47

30 In other words, Royce sees Dewey’s instrumentalism, James’ pragmatism, and Schiller’s humanism as voluntarism by another name, at least after voluntarism becomes a popular name for a long-standing tendency. In addition, as voluntarisms, each putatively is driven by their own logic towards Royce’s non-Hegelian Absolute. Finally, by identifying his Absolute Voluntarism with Absolute Pragmatism, Royce in effect

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declares himself (and Peirce) as the only real pragmatists. So what did Dewey say about (absolute) voluntarism?

6. Dewey and Royce: Critiquing the Possibility of Absolute Voluntarism

31 In many ways, Dewey’s intellectual background is similar to Royce’s, as he studied Kant with Henry Augustus Pearson Torrey (1837-1902) in Vermont, and with the philosopher George Sylvester Morris (1840-1889) and the psychologist Granville Stanley Hall (1846-1924) at Johns Hopkins in the early 1880’s.48 Nonetheless, as might be expected, Dewey had as little use for “voluntarism” as he did for any -ism. In his preface to 1910’s The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays, Dewey (1910: ix) notes […] a recent German critic has described pragmatism as “Epistemologically, nominalism; psychologically, voluntarism; cosmologically, energism; metaphysically, agnosticism’ ethically, meliorism on the basis of the Bentham-Mill .” It maybe that pragmatism will turn out to be all of this formidable array; but even should it, the one who thus defines it has hardly come within earshot of it.49

32 This is because pragmatism, as a spirit of continual reconstruction, resists classification in terms of the prior systems it is reconstructing. This is not to deny pragmatism’s relation to the history of philosophy, but runs the risk of unpragmatically seeing pragmatism as a set of fixed doctrines established in no longer extant conditions of life.

33 On the other hand, when it came to the symposium held in Royce’s honor at the 1915 American Philosophical Association, published in the following year in The Philosophical Review, Dewey is happy to use Royce’s terminology.50 Dewey situates the development of Royce’s philosophy along the axis of voluntarism and intellectualism, the latter here understood as “[…] any philosophy which treats the subject-matter of experience as primarily and fundamentally an object of cognition” (Dewey, 1916: 245 Fn1). Dewey also begins with Royce’s 1881 Kant address, and argues that is is indeed an expression of voluntarism. However, Dewey contends that Royce demotes voluntarism in 1885’s the Religious Aspect of Philosophy, making intellectualism primary in his account of the Absolute as an Absolute Thought.51 This is so even though Dewey acknowledges that Royce’s treatment of all cognitive ideas is voluntaristic. Dewey also admits that the account of the Absolute in The Religious Aspect of Philosophy is somewhat anomalous: “[…] in the formulations of this absolute knowing consciousness intellectualistic considerations predominate to a greater extent than in Mr. Royce’s subsequent formulations” (Dewey, 1916: 252).52

34 Dewey’s remarks are fair enough, as we have already highlighted some ways Royce strove to reconcile his voluntarist commitments with his intellectualist impulses.53 Dewey continues with two potential lines of criticism of Royce. The first is that solutions are relative to problems, and “[w]ith Mr. Royce the problem is fixed by the results of the Kantian philosophy, taken in its broad sense” (Dewey, 1916: 252). Thus, while Dewey does not make the implication explicit, those unmotivated by Kantian problems will tend to be unsatisfied with Royce’s solution. Second, and most significantly for us, Dewey denies that Royce is a pragmatist, on three grounds. One, while pragmatism might be stated in psychological terms, and thereby be a kind of psychological voluntarism, it does not have to be stated so. Two, on Dewey’s view there

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is no attention to empirical consequences in Royce (at least, in 1881), arguing that Peirce himself repudiated this as a Practicalism, but not Pragmatism.54 Three, Royce’s theory of judgment is both intellectualist and voluntarist, but still not pragmatist: “Construing the operation of fulfilling a supreme cognitive interest in terms of purpose and will is a very different thing from construing cognitive interest in terms of a process of fulfilment of other interests, vital, social, ethical, esthetic, technological, etc.” (Dewey, 1916: 253).55 Indeed, the voluntarism of 1881 transforms into the intellectualism of 1885 because of Royce’s latent ethical absolutism. In other words, even with Royce’s voluntarism, he was never a real pragmatist.56

35 Royce scholars, such as Auxier and Oppenheim, have argued that Dewey’s focus on the 1880’s, despite some references to Royce’s later work, is unfair to Royce. Dewey is kinder in a 1930 address, in part because of minimizing the ill spoken of the dead, in part because of an apparent greater familiarity with the later Royce. There Dewey concedes something pragmatic in Royce: “It is well known that Royce was favorable to a voluntaristic pragmatic theory of ideas, in their empirical aspect as distinct from their ultimate metaphysical status” (Oppenheim, 2001: 211). Nonetheless, Dewey repeats his 1916 criticism that Royce solutions are unacceptable because they derive from problems wrongly stated. Likewise, “I have had to come to the conclusion that the idealistic tradition from which Royce started continued to hamper him and prevented a full development of [his] own intrinsic genius” (Oppenheim, 2001: 214). Again, while Dewey does not make it explicit, we can interpret intellectualistic idealism as the tradition hampering Royce’s intrinsic voluntaristic pragmatism.

7. Conclusion

36 I intended the title of this paper as a genuine question, though one I hope to have put additional force behind. As Dewey argues, solutions are relative to problems, and perhaps the problem of the relation between German Idealism and American Pragmatism is better recast as the contest between intellectualism and voluntarism. Of course, offering another opposed set of traditions may only amplify the complexity of the relationship between the traditions of idealism and pragmatism, but sometimes a thread that leads us through a labyrinth does so by showing us how convoluted the labyrinth is. Royce’s Absolute Voluntarism is a fertile line of inquiry because it helps us to see how his efforts to reconcile intellectualism and voluntarism informed, and were informed by, his fellow pragmatists. With Peirce, we saw both the well-known admonition that Royce study logic as well as a less-known call for a greater appreciation for Secondness and a proper conception of the Will. James was a constant influence on Royce’s thought, in part because of their mutual background in the voluntaristic psychology of Wundt. As for Dewey, he showed that Royce’s psychological, even metaphysical, voluntarism may not have been enough to make him a full pragmatist.

37 Nonetheless, voluntarism is likely the right question to ask. With voluntarism we were able to open windows upon other lines of influence that, while often refracted through the prism of Kant, are also distinct from at least Hegel’s form of German idealism. Again, Wundt’s voluntaristic psychology reaches back to the idealism of Leibniz, Fichte takes a larger role, and the consonances with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are more clear. Likewise, Bergson’s Intuitionism continues a tradition of French Voluntarism

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with pre-Kantian roots, and includes Renouvier, an undeniable influence on James.57 Finally, thanks to Baldwin and Schiller promoting the term as defined by Tufts, “voluntarism” became more or less a keyword for the classical pragmatists, and more broadly for commentators and participants in the debates surrounding pragmatism. Of course, the distance of over one hundred years might grant us a clarity they lacked; nonetheless, we should strive to include the forgotten in our community of inquiry.

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OPPENHEIM Frank M., (2001), “Dewey on Royce: A Recently Discovered MS, and a Response,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 37 (2), 207-21.

OPPENHEIM Frank M., (2005), Reverence for the Relations of Life: Re-Imagining Pragmatism via Josiah Royce’s Interactions with Peirce, James, and Dewey, Notre Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame Press.

PARKER Kelly, (2008), “Josiah Royce: Idealism, Transcendentalism, Pragmatism,” in Cheryl Misak (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 110-24.

PEIRCE Charles S., (1931-1958), The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, , , and Arthur Burks, eds, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. (Cited as CP volume.paragraph.)

PEROVICH Anthony, (2016), “Ethics and the Individuation of the Self: Royce’s ‘Dash of Fichte’,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 52 (2), 166-78.

PHILP Joseph Howard, (1916), “The Principle of Individuation in the Philosophy of Josiah Royce,” Yale University, Dissertation.

PRATT Scott L., (2010), “The Politics of Disjunction,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 46 (2), 202-20.

PRIVITELLO Lucio A., (2016), “Josiah Royce on Nietzsche’s Couch,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 52 (2), 179-200.

RANDALL Jr. John Herman, (1966), “Josiah Royce and American Idealism,” The Journal of Philosophy, 63 (3), 57-83.

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RILEY I. Woodbridge, (1909), “Transcendentalism and Pragmatism: A Comparative Study,” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 6 (10), 263-66.

ROYCE Josiah, (1881), “Kant’s Relation to Modern Philosophic Progress,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 15 (4), 360-81.

ROYCE Josiah, (1885), The Religious Aspect of Philosophy: A Critique of the Bases of Conduct and Faith, Boston, Houghton Mifflin.

ROYCE Josiah, (1892), The Spirit of Modern Philosophy: An Essay in the Form of Lectures, Boston, Houghton Mifflin.

ROYCE Josiah, (1894), “The External World and Social Consciousness,” The Philosophical Review, 3 (5), 513-45.

ROYCE Josiah, (1900), The World and the Individual: First Series The Four Historical Conceptions of Being, New York, The Macmillan Company.

ROYCE Josiah, (1901), The World and the Individual: Second Series Nature, Man, and the Moral Order, New York, The Macmillan Company.

ROYCE Josiah, (1903), Outlines of Psychology: An Elementary Treatise with some Practical Applications, New York, The Macmillan Company.

ROYCE Josiah, (1904), “The Eternal and the Practical,” The Philosophical Review, 13 (2), 113-42.

ROYCE Josiah, (1908), The Philosophy of Loyalty, New York, The Macmillan Company.

ROYCE Josiah, (1911), William James and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Life, New York, The Macmillan Company.

ROYCE Josiah, (1913), The Problem of Christianity, 2 volumes, New York, The Macmillan Company.

ROYCE Josiah, (1920), Fugitive Essays, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

SANTAYANA George, (1915), Egotism in German Philosophy, London, Toronto, J. M. Dent.

SANTAYANA George, (1955), Character and Opinion in the , New York, George Braziller.

SCHILLER Ferdinand Canning Scott, (1912), Humanism, 2nd edition, London, Macmillan and Co., Limited.

SCOTT Stanley J., (1991), Frontiers of Consciousness: Interdisciplinary Studies in American Philosophy and Poetry, New York, Fordham University Press.

SHOOK John R., (2000), Dewey’s Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality, Nashville, Vanderbilt University Press.

SPILLER Gustav, (1904), “Voluntarism and Intellectualism: A Reconciliation,” The Philosophical Review, 13 (4), 420-8.

STEBBING L. Susan, (1914), Pragmatism and French Voluntarism: With Especial Reference to the Notion of Truth in the Development of from Maine de Biran to Professor Bergson, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

STREHLE Stephen, (2011), “The Nazis and the German Metaphysical Tradition of Voluntarism,” The Review of Metaphysics, 61 (1), 113-37.

THOMPSON Samuel M., (1956), “Idealism and Voluntarism in Royce,” The Review of Metaphysics, 9 (3), 433-40.

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TOWNSEND H. G., (1928), “The Pragmatism of Peirce and Hegel,” The Philosophical Review, 37 (4), 297-303.

TUFTS James Hayden, (1901), “Voluntarism,” in James Mark Baldwin (ed.), Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, New York, The Macmillan Company.

VAIHINGER Hans, (2014 [1924]), The Philosophy of “As If”: A System of Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, transl. by C. K. Ogden, London, Routledge.

VON HARTMANN Eduard, (1884), Philosophy of the Unconscious: Speculative Results According to the Inductive Method of Physical Science, 3 vols., transl. by William Chatterton Coupland, New York, Macmillan and Co.

WARD James, (1899), Naturalism and Agnosticism: The Gifford Lectures Delivered Before the University of Aberdeen in the Years 1896-1898, vol. 2, New York, The Macmillan Company.

WRIGHT Henry W., (1915), “Principles of Voluntarism,” The Philosophical Review, 24 (3), 297-313.

WUNDT Wilhelm, (1880-83), Logik: Eine Untersuchung der Prinzipien der Erkenntnis und der Methoden wissenenschaftlicher Forschung, 2 vols., Stuttgart, Enke. Reference and Translation from KIM Alan, (2016), “Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt,” Stanford Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta, ed. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-wundt/. Accessed 05/21/2018.

NOTES

1. For example, John Herman Randall Jr., identifies at least four schools of American philosophical idealism. Regarding our present topic, Randall (1966) emphasizes Royce’s consistent refusal to identify as a Hegelian (63), and was instead more influenced by the voluntarism of Schopenhauer (69) and of Fichte (72). 2. See LW 5: 154; cf. Good 2006, and Shook 2000. 3. “Modern Voluntarism is chiefly due, if I mistake not, to the effort escape the relentless conclusions of science, which are hostile to many current, especially religious, conceptions” (Spiller 1904: 428). 4. To add three more: the influence of and other transcendentalists, the U.S. Civil War, and the subsequent Third Great Awakening. Regarding the first: “The generation before the transcendentalists was emotionally starved; that before the pragmatists was intellectually over-fed. Given in one case , and in the other Hegelianism, and a common result was brought about. The rigid of the one, and the monotonous dialectic of the other issued in a common revolty of the will and of the feelings” (Riley 1909: 264). 5. Royce also acknowledges the Kant scholar Hans Vaihinger’s Die Philosophy des Als Ob (The Philosophy of “As If”) as an expression of Voluntarism independent of pragmatism. Vaihinger claims that his Principle of Fictionalism (that false theoretical ideas might still be practically useful) is not pragmatism (Vaihinger, 2014: viii), though he does assert that Kant is a kind of Critical Pragmatist (ibid.: 305). Vaihinger attributes his own voluntarism to Schopenhauer: “Schopenhauer’s teaching gave me much that was new and great and lasting, pessimism, irrationalism, and voluntarism. The impression he made upon me was, although not extensively, yet certainly intensively greater than that of Kant” (ibid.: xxviii-xxix). As we will see later, Schopenhauer was a significant influence on Royce’s voluntarism as well. 6. I say “semi-independent” because the influence of Kant, and thereby some form of idealism, looms over basically all of nineteenth century Western philosophy.

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7. “Concreteness requires an appeal to history, to our actual, historical situatedness and (for understanding of this situatedness) an exploration of a complex, tangled past” (Colapietro, 1992: 424). 8. In “On Purpose in Thought” from a year prior Royce presents a similar account of ‘projection,’ which he sees as “[…] substantially the same as in the thesis presented to the Johns Hopkins Faculty as a candidate for the Doctor’s Degree in spring of 1878 […]” (Royce, 1920: 260). 9. CP 8.7-38 and CP 5.388-410, respectively. From the former: “A better rule for avoiding the deceits of language is hit: Do things fulfill the same function practically? Then let them be signified by the same word. Do they not? Then let them be distinguished” (CP 8.33). From the latter: “It appears, then, that the rule for attaining the third grade of clearness of apprehension is as follows: Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object” (CP 5.402). 10. This is not to say that Royce does not take Schopenhauer seriously; see Auxier 2013, and Carlson 2016 for more on Royce’s engagement with Schopenhauer. Another candidate for Alogical Monism that Royce took seriously is Nietzsche: “It is rarely appreciated in Royce studies the extent to which he followed and was influenced by the work of Nietzsche” (Auxier, 2013: 29). See also Privitello 2016. 11. Of course, Peirce suggests a similar relation to Kant in 1905: “The Kantist has only abjure from the bottom of his heart the proposition the thing-in-itself can, however indirectly, be conceived; and then correct the details of Kant’s doctrine accordingly, and he will find himself to have become a Critical Common-sensist” (CP 5.452). This does not mean his correction is the same as Royce’s, however; for example, almost all of Peirce’s uses of “projection” are geometrical. Instead, Peirce advocates for a Doctrine of Immediate Perception, even of an immediate perception of the indefinitely past because time is a continuum. “But once grant immediate knowledge in time, and what becomes of the idealist theory that we immediately know only the present?” (CP 1.38). In this light, Royce is still very much an idealist in 1881. 12. Cp. Scott (1991: 25): “The very intuition of one’s own ignorance and fallibility is then, according to Royce, a sign of the possibility of an expanded consciousness in which there is no gap between idea and fact, in which our conceptions find themselves actualized in experience.” 13. Peirce continues: “You may quarrel with the word volition if you like; I wish I had a more general one at my hand.” In general, while Peirce continually emphasizes the “volitional” aspect of experience, he also worries about importing psychological concepts by using “Will” to describe this aspect; for example, “[…] what I call Molition, which is volition minus all desire and purpose, the mere consciousness of exertion of any kind […] Molition is a double consciousness of exertion and resistance” (CP 8.303-304). Peirce almost certainly coined “molition” from the Latin molere, “to grind.” See also CP 8.178 and 8.315. 14. See CP 1.389 (from “A Guess at the Riddle” 1887-1888) for the terminology of “immediate” (Firstness), “polar” (Secondness), and “synthetic” (Thirdness) consciousness or sense; cp. primisense, altersense, and medisense (CP 7.551). 15. Though I should note that Royce (1885: xi) declares in the preface to The Religious Aspect of Philosophy: “The author, however, cannot call himself an Hegelian, much as he owes to Hegel.” Just before this Royce (ibid.: x) distinguishes “[…] two Hegels: one an uncompromising idealist, with his general and fruitful insistence upon the great fundamental truths of idealism; the other the technical Hegel of the ‘Logik,’ whose dialectical method seems destined to remain, not a philosophy, but the idea of a philosophy.” Royce rejects the latter Hegel, and with the former recognizes a debt that properly belongs to the idealistic movement as a whole. 16. For a brief account of the “Abbot Affair,” and Peirce’s relationship with Royce overall, see Oppenheim 1997. The definitive biography of Royce remains Clendenning 1999.

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17. Quoted in Oppenheim (1997: 259), from 30 December 1897 review in The Nation. Perovich 2016 argues that this voluntarist shift comes at least in part from Royce’s return to Fichte during this period. 18. This is not to say the influence was one-sided; again, see Oppenheim 1997. 19. Also, “It is time, I think, that the long customary, but unjust and loose usage of the adjective ‘Hegelian’ should be dropped” (ibid.: xi). 20. See Pratt (2010: 204): “Like other idealists of the time, Royce viewed consciousness (in particular, conscious choice or voluntarism) as an essential component of any account of knowledge (and any account of social systems, ethics, and science as well).” Cp. Thompson (1956: 433-4) on Cotton: “Voluntarism is the central theme of Royce’s logic as well as his metaphysics.” 21. On the other hand: “Such reasonings and all reasonings turn upon the idea that if one exerts certain kinds of volition, one will undergo in return certain compulsory perceptions […] Hence is justified the maxim, belief in which constitutes pragmatism […]” (CP 5.9). Also see CP 5.488 Fn P1: “[…] voluntary inhibition, which is the chief characteristic of mankind,” and cp. Colapietro 1985. 22. Cf. Jarvis (1975: 151 fn 42). 23. See especially Oppenheim 2005, and Auxier 2013. 24. While in Germany Royce studied philosophy with the neo-Kantian (1848-1915) and Rudolph (1817-1881), an especially influential and neglected critic of Hegelian Idealism. 25. As ’ (1901: 435) notes in her own psychology text, “Perhaps the most significant contribution of psychology is his sharp distinction between inattentive and attentive consciousness (petites perceptions and apperception).” Calkins studied with James, Royce, Santayana, as well as Hugo Münsterberg, another student of Wundt’s. 26. Though James had qualms with Wundt’s terminology, at least: “I must confess finding all Wundt’s utterances about ‘apperception’ both vacillating and obscure. I see no use whatever for the word, as he employs it, in Psychology. Attention, perception, conception, volition are its ample equivalents” (James, 1890: I.89). 27. I say “seemingly” because the transcendental unity of consciousness/apperception is one of the more obscure parts of Kant. The term “apperception” comes into psychology via (1776-1841), who drew on Leibniz as well as Kant. 28. Philp argues that Royce’s account of attention “[…] developed into the Voluntarism for which Royce stands in the academic world” (Philp, 1916: 22). 29. See (Auxier 2013: 142). 30. In addition to the novelty of this set of distinctions Royce (1903: viii) highlights “[…] the persistent stress I lay upon the unity of the intellectual and voluntary processes, which, in popular treatises, are too often sundered, and treated as if one of them could go on without the other […].” Again, think of Peirce’s recasting of Feeling, Willing, and Knowing as immediate feeling, polar sense, and synthetical consciousness (CP 1.382 “A Guess at the Riddle”). With both set of terms Peirce’s innovation is in distinguishing Feeling and Sensation, placing the later as a mode of polar sense along with the Will. 31. “In brief, the preservation of a happy balance between the imitative functions and those that emphasise social contrasts and oppositions forms the basis for every higher type of mental activity” (Royce 1903: 279). Furthermore, “[…] all the functions which constitute self- consciousness show themselves outwardly in social reactions, that is, in dealing with other real or ideal personages, and are, in our own minds, profoundly related to and inseparable from our social consciousness) (ibid.: 279-80; original emphasis removed). Royce argues for this as early as 1894’s “The External World and Social Consciousness.” 32. “But what is my will? By nature I know not; for by birth I am a mere eddy in the turbulent stream if inherited human passion. How, then shall I get a will of my own? Only through social ” (Royce 1908: 35).

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33. Compare the role of the ‘social impulse’ in Peirce’s 1877 “The Fixation of Belief” (CP 5.378, 5.384); the phrase also appears in 1878’s “The Doctrine of Chances” (CP 2.655). 34. Quoted in CP 5.494. No variant of “Voluntarism” is noted in the Robin Catalog. I say “half- hearted, at best” because Peirce says if we redefine “psychology” to mean “common sense” he might agree with Schiller. 35. considered Leibniz the first German philosopher, whose voluntarism is a symptom of the egotism of German philosophy: “From this metaphor [of an ‘unconscious’ Will], when its boldness seems to be dulled by use, we may pass insensibly to giving the name of Will to that whole transcendental potency of the soul which, like the mainspring of a watch, lay coiled up tightly within it from the beginning of time” (Santayana, 1915: 36-7). For Santayana, this tradition of German egotism ultimately expresses itself in the political developments culminating in World War I: “Not that the German philosophers are responsible for the war, or for that recrudescence of corporate fanaticism which prepared it from afar. They merely shared and justified prophetically that spirit of uncompromising self-assertion and metaphysical conceit which the German nation is now reducing to action” (ibid.: 7). See also Strehle 2011. 36. Of course, mentioning the long history of voluntarism is not to deny the originality of the pragmatists: “No one who remembers his history of philosophy would think of calling this in either its content or its method a ‘brand new’ discovery […] On the other hand, this same historical sense should make it equally impossible, even from a very superficial survey, to regard the movement as a mere masquerade of some earlier type of voluntarism” (Moore, 1904: 748). 37. Dunham goes on to show that Renouvier’s idealist methodology informs James’ pragmatism as a whole, especially his “Will to Believe.” 38. More strongly: “It is the fashion among present day philosophers to depreciate reason, and in the forefront of these are the French Voluntarists – especially the Bergsonian Intuitionists – and the Pragmatists. But in their methods and conclusions they are obviously opposed and an attempt is made to show that in no sense can the French Voluntarists be classed as Pragmatists” (Stebbing, 1914: v). Furthermore, Stebbing contends that both American Pragmatism and French Voluntarism have insufficient conceptions of truth compared to Intellectualism. 39. Of course, this does not exhaust the varieties of “voluntarism.” For example, Cantrell argues that James, following Royce’s The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, is a theological voluntarist in “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”: “[…] consistent with current discussion in metaethics, I mean simply that James held an obligation to perform some action has whatever moral status is possesses in virtue of God’s commanding (or failing to command) the relevant action” (Cantrell, 2013: 5). 40. In “The Ethical Basis of Metaphysics,” an Ethical Society address also published in the International Journal of Ethics. Here is the usage: “[…] [Pragmatism] is a conscious application to the theory of life of the psychological facts of cognition as they appear to a teleological Voluntarism” (Schiller, 1912: 8). I should note that here Schiller criticizes Baldwin’s, James’, and Peirce’s definitions of “pragmatism” in Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology – Peirce’s is “[…] so obvious to be comparatively unimportant […]” while James’ is insufficiently psychologically voluntarist, and Baldwin’s insufficiently metaphysically voluntarist. 41. In addition to Dewey, A. W. Moore’s 1904 review of Schiller’s Humanism, among others, certainly helped propagate the term. See also Bawden 1904. 42. In particular: “Experience can not without mutilation be resolved into three departments, one cognitive or theoretical, one emotional, one practical […] It is true that what we take and what we find we must take and find as it is given. But, on the other hand, it is also true that we do not take – or at least do not take up – what is uninteresting; nor do we find, unless we seek, nor seek unless we desire. The cognitive aspect of experience, in a word, is far more one of experiment, as its very etymology suggests, than one of mere disinterested observation” (Ward, 1899: 133). Like James, Ward began as a physiologist and psychologist, and studied under Hermann Lotze like

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Royce. In addition to being a Voluntarist, Ward is a Leibnizian idealist, in part due to the influence of Lotze – another reminder that German Idealism is a tradition with its own internal tensions and undercurrents. 43. A fuller account of the relation between idealism and pragmatism would do well to look at the English proponents of each side in more detail. 44. Again, think of Peirce on “Will” as one aspect of our polar experience of effort/resistance. 45. “Hegel made the question [of the relations between our ideals of conduct and our acknowledgement of truth] a fundamental one in various places in his Logic” (Royce, 1904: 114). 46. And one more: “The direction of development in modern epistemology clearly suggests, therefore, that we may hope for a final solution of the knowledge problem only if we refuse to separate theory from practice, only if we insist upon treating thought as an expression of will” (Wright, 1915: 299). 47. Intriguingly, Royce’s sees support for his Absolutism in the development of non-Euclidean geometry, as well as the mathematical logic of Peirce, Alfred Kempe, George Moore, and . 48. While sometimes described as a Hegelian, Morris studied with Friedrich Trendelenburg, who favored neo-Aristotleian idealism over Hegelian Absolutism. Hall had studied with Wundt, and was a founder of educational psychology. 49. Dewey adds a footnote avering “The affair is even more portentous in the German with its capital letters and series of muses.” 50. For more on this festschrift, see Friedman 2016. 51. “The transition to Absolutism is through (a) the discovery of the scepticism laten in voluntarism made ultimate: (b) in the demand for a community of aims or organization of wills: (c) the discovery that all recognition of ignorance and error, all sceptical doubt involves an appeal to a Judger or Thought which included both the original object and the original judgment about it” (Dewey, 1916: 250). 52. Regarding the intellectualism of the Absolute, Dewey’s criticism of Bradley in “The Intellectualist Criterion of Truth” probably expresses his view of Royce as well: “There really seems to be a ground for supposing that the whole argument turns on an ambiguity in the use of the word ‘absolute.’ Keeping strictly within the limits of the argument, it means nothing more than that thinking has a certain principle, a law of its own; that is has an appropriate mode of procedure which must be violated […] But Mr. Bradley immediately takes the word to mean absolute in the sense of describing a reality which by its very nature is totally contradistinguished from appearance-that is to say, from the realm of thought” (1910: 123). 53. Or his intellectualist commitments with his voluntarist impulses. Compare Santayana’s assessment of Royce’s system: “He wanted all minds to be one in some way which should be logically and morally necessary, and which yet, as he could not help feeling, was morally and logically impossible” (Santayana, 1955: 75). In a similar critical mode, Lindsay calls Royce’s view a “[…] mystical pan-egoistic epistemology […]” combined with a “[…] rather chaotic voluntaristic psychology […]” (Lindsay, 1918: 438). See also Flamm 2000. 54. Peirce does this in 1905’s “What Pragmatism Is” (CP 5.412). 55. Bixler (1936: 201) shares Dewey’s assessment: “If we turn to some of the early articles we find Royce’s statements about himself confirmed with one exception that ‘voluntarism’ defines the early views better than does the word ‘pragmatism.’ Royce does not seem to have shared pragmatism’s distinctive interest in the future or in the philosophical importance of other purposes than the cognitive.” 56. This is illustrative of the tensions within the pragmatist tradition, as Anderson (2005: 471) notes: “Thus Royce and Dewey, in quite different ways, sought to exclude each other from the camp of functioning pragmatism. At the same time, both men included Peirce among the

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pragmatists, in part because James had identified Peirce as the originator of the movement but also in part because they saw some strong affinities between Peirce’s thought and their own.” 57. While this paper is historical, I should not fail to mention that James’ “Will to Believe” remains a touchstone in more recent debates about doxastic voluntarism and the ethics of belief, even outside of pragmatist circles.

ABSTRACTS

This paper proposes an alternative perspective on the question of the relationship between German Idealism and American Pragmatism through attention to the philosophy of Josiah Royce. Despite being seen as a Hegelian, Royce declared himself a pragmatist. However, he also called his position Absolute Voluntarism. This paper suggests that the real issue between Idealism and Pragmatism is Intellectualism vs. Voluntarism. This distinction both parallels and cuts across the traditions of German Idealism and American Pragmatism, and promises to open up a view broader than the traditional accounts of the qualified appreciation of Hegel seen in Peirce and Dewey, or the outright antipathy of James. With Peirce, we see that his continual call for Royce to study logic includes, or complements, his criticisms that Royce neglects Secondness. Regarding James, we see his influence on Royce is mediated also in their mutual study of Wundt’s voluntaristic psychology, which has its own roots in the pre-Kantian German Idealism of Leibniz. As for Dewey, he acknowledges Royce’s voluntarism, but rejects Royce’s claim that his Absolute Pragmatism/Voluntarism is pragmatism at all. Nonetheless, even if Royce failed to fuse his idealism and pragmatism, the very effort suggests he saw them as distinct enough to need fusion.

AUTHOR

DANIEL J. BRUNSON

Morgan State University daniel.brunson[at]morgan.edu

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Conceptualistic Pragmatism

Terry Pinkard

I

1 American pragmatism, like German idealism, was created by a generation who had collectively suspecting that they were going to have to live unprecedented lives. The paths through life that their parents and grandparents had traced seemed to offer no effective guide, and they thereby felt that they had to imagine different ways of thinking about life, the world, and even about thinking itself. For the pragmatists, the background was the , the second scientific revolution (in chemistry and, in Darwin’s biology), and industrialization and its accompanying brutalities and dislocation.1 For the idealists, it was the contradictions deeply twisted into the fragmented social and political world of Germany prior to and immediately following the French Revolution. In both cases, there was the generational experience that they could not be the people who fit into that world, and that things therefore were going to and had to change.

2 Of course, there were also great differences. Most notably, the early idealists did not experience industrialization in Germany, even if they did experience some of the shocks its early appearance in England had produced. Likewise, it was not the violence of a civil war but the violence and promise of the French Revolution that spurred their imaginations. As we might put it, for both of them – idealists and early pragmatists – the problem was that of grasping their own times in thought and in a thought that was also not simply relative to or merely expressive of the times but also the way thought “now” had to understand its prospects and possible limits.

3 For both idealists and pragmatists, the key word was “experience” – and in both cases in the German sense of Erfahrung. This was not the experience of a sense-datum or a fleeting moment or a raw feel. It was rather the experience from which one learned something, a more concrete conception of an encounter with a sometimes recalcitrant physical and social world. It was not accidental that Hegel’s original title for his first real book, The Phenomenology of Spirit, was the Science of the Experience of Consciousness. The idealists joined to that conception of “experience” the rhetoric of “life” and the

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“organic,” of an overall purposiveness to be found within things, whereas the pragmatists coupled experience with a rhetoric of “openness” and an interest in the logic of inquiry. In both cases, there was a shared conception of the key role of subjectivity-as-activity in thinking about the world, and rejecting, as Dewey later encapsulated it, the “spectator” view of knowing and acting. (It would be interesting but wildly beyond the scope of this paper to contrast the British response of the “absolute idealisms” of Green and Bradley, et al. to the modern British experience.)

4 More crucially, in both cases, the idealists and pragmatists were responding to the modern worry which reaches its high tide in Kant’s philosophy about the limits and possible limitations of thought. Kant, as is well known, thought that given the pure forms of our own intuitive faculties, our thinking was necessarily restricted to appearances and could not progress to knowledge of things in themselves. Things in themselves were real, but they existed on the opposite side of the boundary between thought and the real. However, by the time idealism had moved on to Fichte, Schelling and to Hegel, the Kantian idea that our conceptual capacities are bounded by the forms of intuition was replaced by the idea of conceptual thought as boundless, as answering only to its own demands.2

5 To the pragmatists (as well as others), this seemed to be something like rationalism gone mad, a basic failure to learn the basic Kantian lesson about the limitations under which finite human beings have to think. The kind of openness to experience which the pragmatists extolled meant that we had to be open, as it were, to reality changing our minds for us so that continuous progress in thought can be actualized and the novelty of new learning could be vouchsafed. Pragmatism, as a logic of inquiry (to use Dewey’s phrase) devised a way of looking to the real by way of theory that made theory (of all sorts, scientific as well as philosophical) open to new experiences and to novelties in social life and, crucially, to improvement.3

II

6 To jump ahead: By the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first, pragmatism was certainly alive and well, but in one of its most influential shapes, it had been by and large formed not from the pragmatism of Peirce, Dewey or James but from the much less studied C. I. Lewis. Lewis described his own version in his book, Mind and the World Order, as “conceptualistic pragmatism” (1929: xi). It is Lewis’ picture, more or less, of mind, world, inference and sensibility that has shaped the kind of contemporary pragmatism that finds its exemplars in the works of W. V. O. Quine, , Richard Rorty, and Robert Brandom. Much of this version of pragmatism consists in accepting Lewis’s framework while attacking or shifting the ways in which the frame is put together. In particular, two attacks which are familiar to contemporary philosophers are the Sellarsian attack on the myth of the given and the Quinean attack on the absolute difference between the analytic and synthetic. Much of what remains after those attacks is Lewis’ framework as redescribed and transformed without those two elements. It is thus worth turning back to Lewis’ system if for no other reason than to remind ourselves where the current version comes from.

7 Without stretching terms too much, Lewis’s position could be called Kantian pragmatism.4 We might sum up Lewis’ view as the following: if there are limits to thought, they are set by reality, perhaps even by human reality; thinking is an activity,

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and it is the ends of such activities (the purposes) that set the standards by which we evaluate the means; something like Kant’s categories are to be justified if at all in light of their utility for serving those ends. In Lewis’ system, we thus see pragmatism and idealism coming together under the dominance of the pragmatic component.

III

8 Lewis’s picture of mind and the world order can be easily summarized, although as with everything good the devil (or the lord) is in the details. Lewis’s picture is characterized by stark contrasts, even dualisms (of the kind that Dewey, for example, would disparage). In Lewis’s thought, there is the a posteriori versus the a priori, the given versus the constructed, the passive versus the active. This occurs within Lewis’s larger picture of our contact with reality being through the senses, after which we then organize the data that comes in to us by way of the concepts we apply to the sensuous data.

9 Our most basic concepts are prior to all experience. They are what Kant calls the categories but which Lewis extends further than merely classificatory concepts to include all attempts at making sense of that which given to us in experience (including naming, classifying, defining, and inferring).5 Relations among concepts determine their meaning. The basic concepts – the categories – are a priori: They are true, if they are true, no matter what, as Lewis puts it, and they cannot be determined by experience itself. They are the results of acts of legislation, not abstractions from experience (ibid.: 127). Their meaning is analytic, not material, and to know the meaning of a concept is to know how it relates to other concepts.6 The use of such a priori concepts is implicit in our familiar modes of behavior, and getting clear on their meaning just is making explicit what is always, already there implicitly.7

10 The use of such categories is that of making sense of what is given in experience. “The given” is the empirical element in experience. It consists (Lewis’s term) in , which cannot be named, are ineffable and can only be indicated by phrases such as “looks like” (ibid.: 123). Such “givens” are subjective and can never themselves be objects of knowledge. Knowledge, in this pragmatic-Kantian picture, requires the of two distinct faculties – concepts and sensibility – whose functions cannot be conflated or confused with each other.

11 Lewis notes that the German idealists and their kin deny any such givenness, holding that there can be no element of experience which figures into our judgmental activity which does not have the structure of thought in it. To speak anachronistically, Lewis denies the given is a myth at all. John McDowell’s version of the attack on the myth of the given, for example, has to do with our spontaneity (our conceptual capacities) supposedly going deeply into our receptivity without remainder.8 Lewis’s argument against that would be relatively straightforward: He agrees with McDowell up to a point: “[T]he objectivity of the real requires always construction by the mind. This thesis does not imply any denial that the given is independent of the activity of thought” (Lewis, 1929: 46). On its own, the given cannot be knowledge at all. Nonetheless, thought, our judgmental capacity, cannot alter the sensuous quality of experience. If I am seeing red, I am seeing red, and I cannot alter that by thinking otherwise (even though, as Lewis argues, “red” cannot be the name of any particular qualia, since qualia cannot have names).9 The “given” is simply that sensuous element

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of knowledge that we cannot alter by our own activity and which comes to the mind from the real itself.

12 On Lewis’s account, therefore, purely empiricist theories err in thinking that there could be any knowledge at all via the givens of experience.10 The given is ineffable, and there is no ineffable knowledge. All knowledge is discursive and thus conceptual in structure. Rationalist theories (and here he includes the idealists) err in thinking that since our categorial concepts are a priori and whose meaning cannot be determined by the given that such categories are therefore autonomous elements of knowing.11 The truth of the matter is pragmatic: Our a priori categories are not eternally fixed but are open to change, and the criteria for choosing which of them we legislate to experience is pragmatic in that they are judged in terms of how well they fit a goal.

13 Which goal or goals? Those of life itself taken as an ongoing activity: “Knowledge,” Lewis concludes, “is pragmatic, utilitarian, and its value, like that of the activity it immediately subserves, is extrinsic. It has value as an end in itself only so far as, in life, the activity is the goal, or at least the two cannot be separated” (ibid.: 145). Thus, the a priori categories that make sense of the otherwise ineffable givens of sensibility are themselves a social achievement, something legislated collectively and not products of “pure reason” nor are they matters of objective fact. The categories are guides to action, not descriptions read off of sensible data.12

14 Why then are there not different categories for different societies or even different individuals? Lewis’s answer: Our own natural like-mindedness. Such like-mindedness is part of our natural history, which consists in natural needs and aspirations but also just as much consists in fashioning categories to better predict the course of events as we put the picture together with the givens of sensibility.13 We communicate with each other or have the same concept when we how our behavior implicitly expresses those concepts: “The concept is a definitive structure of meanings, which is what would verify completely the coincidence of two minds when they understand each other by the use of language” (ibid.: 89).14 Unless there was an identity of meaning, there could be no genuine coincidence of minds. There is no identity of givens. This kind of like- mindedness leads to our having a common world that is the common human world, since “we do not expect to have a common reality with an insect” (ibid.: 113). Our common world is thus itself a social achievement.

15 Our knowledge of empirical objects can therefore only be a matter of probability.15 The real object is only “the given as conceptually interpreted,” (ibid.: 117) and, as known, “the real object […] is a construction.”16 Ultimately, the real object would manifest itself only at infinity. Knowing is an infinite approximation to the real, so that the “totality of possible experiences in which any interpretation could be verified” (which would be infinite) “is the entire meaning of that interpretation” (ibid.: 32). Not merely do we not know the object fully (non-probabilistically) until the end of the endless series, we could also not know fully what we mean until the end of the endless series. Indeed, it would only be with a picture of what that would look like that we could assign the of these interpretations.

16 Given Lewis’s view, there can simply be no transcendental deduction of the categories in Kant’s sense, since what drives the need for such a deduction is the skeptical worry that our sensibility may present us with objects that do not fall under the categories. Meeting that worry drove Kant into his various formulations about how it must be that we impose the categories on experience such that no object could appear that violated

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any of the categorial requirements. No such limitation, however, can be put on the given by our concepts – that much is meant by “the given.” We cannot put any limits on what might show up in our sensory experience. Nor can the given limit what possible categorial concepts we might .17 To underline the point: All the possible givens have no a priori concatenation that fixes in advance what qualia can appear. Such givens are not even constrained by logic itself, since the ultimate criteria for any logic would be themselves pragmatic, to be evaluated in terms of how well they too fit some purpose.18 If there are any limits to knowledge, they will have to be the limits to reality itself. The Kantian mistake, which Lewis attributes to all forms of (under which he classifies Kantianism) is that “from the relativity of knowledge to the mind, it argues to the impossibility of knowing the independent real” (ibid.: 173). The real object can indeed be interpreted or measured in a number of different ways, but that diversity of interpretation does not mean that the real object is beyond all possible knowability. There simply can be no realm of “in principle” unknowable things in themselves, even though there not only may be many things we do not know and even some that are beyond us because of natural facts about our makeup.

IV

17 Given that summary, where does Lewis’s conceptualistic pragmatism stand in relation to its earlier forbearers in German idealism and his predecessors in American pragmatism, and where does it stand in relation to his later successors in pragmatism? With regard to the latter, we can see how Lewis’s framework sets the shape for a good bit of the later pragmatism embodied by Quine, Sellars, Rorty and Brandom, much more so than does, say, James’s or Dewey’s pragmatism. The sharp dualisms that Lewis defends – conceptual understanding (the analytic nature of meaning) on one side, sensory givens on the other – provide a powerful picture of mind and world. Lewis’s resulting picture was thus, most abstractly put: A causal connection (input), plus the sensory givenness of qualia, plus an inferential processing of the qualia, and then a propositional statement of the inferential interpretation of the qualia. Lewis’s successors transformed that picture into what we can think of as embodying a tripartite causal and inferential view of the matter. First, there are the causal inputs on the minded organism (photons entering the retina, sound waves in the air vibrating bones in the ear, etc.); second, there are the causal outputs of the organism that respond to those causal inputs (among these causal outputs are observation sentences or phrases, such as “Lo, a cow” or “This is green”); and in between are the inferential movements within the mind itself (where “within” just means “internal to the inferential process”). Thus, a stimulus of red (a wavelength of a certain sort) affects the sensory apparatus, the inferential wheels begin spinning (“Well, if it’s red, it’s certainly not green”), and there is a causal, learned output, the production of a sentence. (“Whoa, that’s red, all right.”)

18 Quine took over this picture, but rejected the idea of purely conceptual meaning (analyticity) and substituted instead the image of a web of such beliefs in which some were more central than others but none was “conceptually” or “analytically” true. That left only the causal inputs and outputs (which, sort of in keeping with some of the science of his day, he interpreted behavioristically), and inferential connections (which

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in the term of art of a large part of contemporary philosophy is called “the normative”) are reduced to beliefs to which we develop dispositions to assent or dissent.19 Quine took Lewis’s already fairly naturalized framework which still had a separate place for philosophical reflection on the relation between mind and world and fully naturalized it to render it compatible completely with natural science as it was practiced in mid- to-late twentieth century culture. Quine, as it were, deconceptualized Lewis’s conceptualist pragmatism but kept its overall structure: Categorial concepts are those that are more at the center of the web of belief (so they are not a priori as the a priori has been traditionally conceived), they are justified in terms of their pragmatic utility (for example, in predicting events), and they are subject to change or being given up when they no longer serve certain purposes as well as others.20

19 The other line of thought that followed in Lewis’s wake dismissed the “given” under the pressure of Sellars’s general criticism of all forms of givenness and his more specifically focused criticisms of the given as a sensory content that could serve in any way as premises in cognitive activity (carried out in his canonical “Empiricism and the ”).21 Once the sensory “given” had been rejected, the resulting three pronged image that itself came from Lewis’s framework became canonical: There is a causal interaction between organism and environment (best studied by neuroscientists and empirically minded psychologists), which elicits a series of normative inferences that are not themselves based on any further inference but are simply set in motion by the input, and a learned disposition to utter phrases such as “Whoa, that’s red, all right” and even more complicated phrases such as “There’s a rabbit.” Learning to respond to inputs in ways that adequately embody the inferential network of one’s beliefs is itself a causal process – it has to be, since otherwise without an immediate given, there would be an infinite regress of inferences – an idea which is best encapsulated in Robert Brandom’s concept of reliably differential responsive dispositions.22 We are trained as youths to respond to wavelengths of light between 620-750 nm (red light) in ways that in English come out as something like “Ooh, red.” It is not the case that we see a qualia, grasp its category in English, and then infer to “Ooh, red” – we simply are trained to respond those wavelengths in certain ways, and when things go right we acquire the dispositions that turn us into reliable responders who can perform subtly differentiated responses.

20 This picture also is at work in Richard Rorty’s views on mind and world,23 and it seems to be the picture at work in Donald Davidson’s equally influential views.24 It reaches its apotheosis in Brandom’s explication of it. Brandom takes Lewis’s framework, transforms concepts into inferential links, discards the Lewisian sensory given and substitutes a generalized concept of “the physical process that occurs between organism and world in the organism’s sensing of the world,” and keeps the naturalized concept of our being trained (which leans on inherent dispositions in the species) into responding in certain ways. We pass from sensing beings to sapient beings when we learn to move fully in the inferential patterns which are embodied, as Lewis puts it, in a concept’s “internal (essential or definitive) relationships with other concepts” (1929: 83) (which Brandom takes to be formal and material inferential relationships, where material inferences are those like, e.g., “if X is red, then it is not green”). Common to all these is an idea that the test, the rationale, for operating with one interpretive scheme over another is that of predicting the future and thus learning to control it in some way.25 That is the “pragmatic” in “conceptualist pragmatism.”

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V

21 To those familiar with German Idealism, Lewis’s system most obviously bears a resemblance to Fichte’s post-Kantian philosophy. Like Fichte, Lewis dispenses with the very idea of an in principle unknowable thing-in-itself,26 and like Fichte, he thinks that there is progress in knowledge which ends only at infinity (in other words, which has no ending).27 For that matter, Lewis himself even states his affinity with Fichte: “This interpretive fiat is what Fichte stresses as the positing of the ‘not-me’” (1929: 46).

22 The resemblance starts from Fichte’s own commencement with the conception of a thinking agent so that for the agent’s thinking (the “I”) to have any real authority, the agent must posit – that is, authorize – that there is something entirely distinct from its thinking (the “Not-I”) which exercises authority over thinking. That is, thinking must acknowledge its absolute authority to bestow authority on something else to exercise its authority against thinking, and without that bestowal of authority, the “Not-I” could have not authority at all. As it were, the perceptual object must be endowed by the thinking agent with the authority to determine if the thinking agent’s thought about it is authoritative. The rest of Fichte’s system is more or less bound up with trying to make sense of how that seeming contradiction could possibly work itself out into something less seemingly paradoxical. Lewis himself, however, thinks that the paradox in Fichte’s beginning is never resolved, and he offers his own diagnosis of why.

23 Fichte wonders where the mind (or the conceptual framework itself) gets its initial authority to do this, and he claims that the only alternative is to think of the mind positing itself as exercising such authority in the first place and then going on to think of this authority as requiring of itself that something other than mind give it both determinate content and real authority – a kind of “I authorize it to tell me what I can authorize.” Fichte starts from a conception of unity or oneness of mind with itself and then goes on to see how mind fractures itself into two in seeking its own unconditional epistemic authority. Lewis, on the other hand, argues that we must begin with a fundamental dualism between concept and sensory given (the “I” and the “Not-I”), and his argument boils down to the claim that we can in the last analysis make no sense at all of what it would mean for mind “to create or constitute itself” as Fichte seems to think.28 Lewis’s alternative to Fichte thus goes: Our conception of a mind already includes the limitation of its conceptual capacities by something not conceptual which is given to us via our senses. We begin with a dualism, not institute it out of some more original unity.

24 If anything, this puts Lewis squarely into the debate the German idealists had among themselves. The post-Kantians were all united in their rejection of Kant’s conception of the a priori forms of intuition (although for varying reasons). An influential traditional interpretation of that rejection had the post-Kantians committed to the view that, once we have rejected Kant’s forms of pure intuition, there was no cognitive role for intuitions to play at all, and as a result they then thought the “mind” (now hypostatized and, as it were, cosmologized) constructed itself and its content without reliance on intuition at all (or that intuitions were themselves such constructs). However, that was not the post-Kantian view really at all, since they were all deeply worried about the place that sensible intuitions played in cognition. None of the major figures thought (contra the often received view) that the sensible was formless, but

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they also did not think that it carried a form with itself that limited conceptual thought in any kind of way that would lead to some conception of an in principle unknowable realm of things in themselves.

25 Lewis also rejects the possibility that we impose conceptual form on a formless sensibility, and he also does not think that our sensory capacities come with any a priori form on their own.29 (The a priori for him is to strictly restricted to the conceptual sphere.) On Lewis’s picture, human mindedness is not a matter of rules being applied to formless data. Comprehensibility has to include both sides within itself: Concepts (as a priori categories) and sensibility (as the given of qualia).

26 In particular, Hegel’s worry about Fichte’s way of proceeding was, put most simply, that Fichte’s way was seductively and misleadingly concrete. Fichte speaks of the “I” positing itself as positing its other, its “Not-I,” and that way of speaking conjures up a picture of a determinate object: An individual person, perhaps looking out a window or staring at a screen, thinking about something, maybe feeling an ache in his or her leg, perhaps consumed with thinking about some philosophical issue, or maybe fully absorbed in an activity such as slicing vegetables. That is, not, however, the “I” that Fichte has in mind, so speaking of an “I” in this case is deceptive. To get a grasp on Fichte’s core idea, though, we must make things more abstract before we can make them more concrete. This too was more or less Lewis’s view.

27 Hegel’s own response, most generally stated, is the idea that the conceptual includes as a constitutive element of itself the sensible, not because we impose the conceptual on the sensible or somehow mix them together like oil and vinegar in a salad dressing, but because conceptuality includes the very concept itself of responsiveness to its other, sensibility. Hegel calls this the concept’s “negativity” for good reason: It forms what in current philosophical jargon is usually called these days “normativity,” the possibility of a judgmental (the use of concepts) appraisal as true or false, adequate or inadequate, etc. Our sensibility cannot be conceived except as a component of our conceptuality, and vice versa. This led to what Hegel knew in advance would be one of more difficult thoughts, namely, his beginning his Logic with the concepts of being and nothing as both equivalent and distinct. “Being,” or the “is-ness” of things is an empty concept; it is not a thing, not a distinct item that could be thought or intuited and therefore cannot be distinguished from “nothing”; and therefore as Hegel puts it, “Pure being and pure nothing are therefore the same […] But the truth is just as much that they are not without distinction; it is rather that they are not the same, that they are absolutely distinct yet equally unseparated and inseparable” (Hegel & Di Giovanni, 2010: 59-60). Thus, the thought of being and nothing turns out not to be an adequate thought at all wholly within its own internal standards, since it contradicts itself, and, again to resort to Hegel’s own words, “it therefore contradicts itself in itself, because what it unites within itself is self-opposed; but such a union destroys itself” (ibid.: 81). This finally gets fleshed out into Hegel’s view that “the concept” has within its own self-conception (the concept of the concept) its own otherness – concept and sensibility are two distinguishable but inseparable components of mind.30

28 This is part of Hegel’s fundamental appropriation of Kantianism. Whereas Fichte, Schelling and even Hölderlin had begun with the conception of an original unity that necessarily fractures itself and then seeks to restore that unity – a version of a basically Judeo-Christian story of the Fall – Hegel begins with the fracture itself. It is not that one has unity (“being”) and then disunity (“being and nothing”). The fracture is there at

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the outset and there is no way of overcoming or abolishing it. As Hegel explicitly states: “being has passed over into nothing and nothing into being – ‘has passed over,’ not passes over” (Hegel & Di Giovanni, 2010: 59). What had presented itself as a fully thinkable judgment – “Being, pure being […] In its indeterminate immediacy it is equal only to itself and also not unequal with respect to another” (ibid.) – turns out not to be an adequately thinkable judgment at all. It turns out to be a deeply flawed thought that cannot be further entertained as it was but has to be altered in order to preserve whatever sense it originally seemed to have.

29 What is perhaps surprising is Lewis’s own rather Romantic response to such an issue: “That mind is thus continuous with the finally mysterious is-ness of what is – we must of course grant; in the contemplation of mind we contemplate one aspect of the Great Fact in the presence of which all explicit thought is silenced” (Lewis, 1929: 236-7). Lewis’s response sounds oddly more like Heidegger, maybe even like Wittgenstein in the Tractatus,31 or perhaps even a bit like Schelling. 32 The original unity of mind and world is not explicable in terms of any of the categories. Indeed, Lewis seems to be committed to the idea that since such an original unity could not be conceptually comprehended or sensibly given, that it could not really be “thought” at all and thus must be met with “silence” even though it a necessary consequence of our thought (Lewis’s “it must be granted…”). To take it further: Lewis’s response is even a bit Kantian in spirit, resembling roughly what Kant said about the experience of natural beauty: It is the indeterminate concept of something that is neither nature nor spirit (that is, neither “given” nor “concept”) that is the common ground of both and thus is the basis of freedom.33

30 Whatever else it is, Lewis’s response is not Hegelian. The idea of a thought of the final ground of all things, the absolute, as something beyond any conceptual grasp, to be accompanied by silence, was anathema to Hegel. He famously called (what was clearly Schelling’s version of it) the night in which all cows are black. He also noted about such views: “There is nothing to be intuited in it, if one can speak here of intuiting; or, it is only this pure empty intuiting itself” (Hegel & Di Giovanni, 2010: 59). It is not that he thought that we knew everything, would ever know everything, or that we have reached some point like the mythical end of history. The absolute which thought grasps in Hegel’s system is indeed unconditional, but it is the unconditional grasp of itself as completing its task only at infinity (that is, never at any point in time), and this timeless unconditional, absolute grasp of itself and its project counts for it counts as “the absolute.” Moreover, such a conception of the absolute is not merely the rather formal conception of the absolute as, say, succeeding only in that it succeeds in knowing in an absolute fashion that it must fail at what it most wants to do – something like that is more akin to Kant’s conception of reason’s only possible success – but a comprehension of itself that can only emerge after it has exhausted the available alternatives and seen both how those alternatives are lacking, how they push on to this conclusion, and how they shape the way the conclusion has to form itself. (At the end of his life, Hegel noted to himself about how in the period surrounding his writing his Phenomenology that the prevailing conception of the absolute was at that time an abstract conception.34 Presumably, he meant that he had now gone beyond that abstraction.) In effect, conceptuality comprehends itself only in its development of its own self-consciousness about itself, and that includes the difficult Hegelian conception of the concept’s otherness within itself, the idea that the determinateness of a concept has to do with how it incorporates something non-conceptual – the world – into itself,

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how conceptual capacities, as it were, come with the idea of responding to the claims of sensibility.35

31 This is also because the Hegelians (and the Schellingians too, although in a different way) think of these capacities as making sense only within the context of the human life-forms in which they manifest themselves. As earlier noted, the metaphor of the organic rather than the mechanical played a key role in both Schelling’s and Hegel’s way of presenting more easily digestible pictures of their views. Roughly put, the mechanical metaphor sees sensibility and conceptuality as each existing apart from the other like modules in a and as working together harmoniously when the machine is functioning correctly (more or less as the components of a well functioning mechanical watch work). The organic metaphor sees sensibility and conceptuality as two, as it were, organs serving the purposes of the organism, such that the determinateness of neither organ could be specified outside of its role in the life of the organism as a whole. Neither can be given its rightful determinacy outside of the way it functions in human life. For each animal life-form, the world shows up in a certain way given the way its neurophysiological system works in connection to its environment. Lettuce shows up to rabbits as food, rabbits show up to foxes as food (and foxes show up to coyotes as food, and on and on). The world shows up to self-conscious humans in a way in which the conceptual always figures in it. As Hegel notes, the world itself shows up as pointing to infinity (as there being always “one more” in time, in space, and so on), and such infinity can only show up to self-conscious creatures since infinity can only be a topic of pure thought, never of purely sensuous experience. Thus, for Hegel, Fichte’s mistake was in thinking that subject or object, one or the other, had to have priority in a truly rigorous account of knowledge and valuation, and Fichte was thus misled into thinking it had to be something concrete: the thinking, active subject, the “I.” The thinking, active subject, however, appears only once we have understood the basic way in which thinking is both the unity of an original fracture between sensibility and concept and requires self-consciousness.

32 In Mind and the World Order, Lewis often speaks as if the two capacities of sensibility and conceptuality were fully independent modules, but if that were true, then their functioning together would have to come from a purpose external to both of them (as it does to the parts of the mechanical watch) instead of each being what it is in terms of a purpose that is internal to the organism itself.

33 Lewis does not discuss in any except a passing manner the way in which the pragmatic application of the conceptual apparatus is part of the purposiveness of the organism, but he does discuss how the like-mindedness of human knowers is based on facts about the kind of creatures they are – or, to use a non-Lewisian formulation, how it is based on their form of life.36 If he took that more seriously, it would lead him away from his more mechanically sounding and into a more Hegelian-Schellingian-Deweyian stance which would be more appropriate to his own system.37 It would also have required him to probe more deeply into what he acknowledged was mind as a social product and to explore the first person singular and plural and how the second person address builds from one to another, as Hegel did in his Phenomenology. The very concept of self- conscious life itself – what Hegel decided to call Geist – involves the conceptions of a first and second-person address which then builds itself up into a first-person singular and plural (an I and a We).38

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34 At that point, the paths traced by idealism and conceptualistic pragmatism would have met.39 To appropriate an image from another philosopher, both the older idealists and the newer pragmatists would find Hegel waiting at the end of the path for all of them, arms folded, saying that he had known all along they would be coming that way. Generational experiences often lead to odd crossroads.

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SELLARS Wilfrid, RORTY Richard & Robert BRANDOM, (1997), Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 181 p.

NOTES

1. See Louis Menand’s delightful but limited account in The Metaphysical Club (2001). Menand overstates the influence of the Civil War and overly ascribes the pragmatist movement to traits of certain key personalities, but he does bring out the generational aspect of the shift to pragmatism. 2. In his 1823 letter to Duboc, a Hamburg hat-maker, Hegel explained that he had nothing against the doctrines of the Scottish philosophers about realism, namely, that the objects of knowledge are independent of our representations of them. What he took issue with was the idea that “things are what they are” – which he rendered in his own terms as “Übereinstimmung des Seins mit sich selbst” (or “the correspondence of being with itself”) – is itself intelligible without comprehending that this too is a “thought-determination” (Denkbestimmung) and is thus the proper subject of the logic of thought itself. See Hegel & Hoffmeister (1961: Briefe #450, p. 12). 3. The young Schelling had a particular animus to seeing the value of new industrial in the context of modern life. As Schelling supposedly told Henry Crabb Robinson, “It is absurd to expect the science of beauty in a country that values the Mathematics only as it helps to make Spinning Jennies and & Stocking-weaving ,” cited in Robinson, Robinson & Morley (1929: 118). 4. In her treatment of Lewis, Cheryl Misak (2013: 191) also describes, rightly, Lewis’ position as being that of a Kantian pragmatist. In taking Lewis’ “conceptualist pragmatism” as a direct descendant of Charles Peirce’s version of pragmatism, Misak also incorporates and corrects much of the still rather meager commentary on Lewis. She also shows the close link between Lewis’ position as it was taken up at the time and the emerging school of logical empiricism in Vienna (which Lewis predated). Because of the perceived similarities between Lewis and the Vienna

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school, Lewis’ position was much easier to integrate into the emerging paradigm of linguistically oriented analytical philosophy than was, for example, Dewey’s. 5. See Lewis (1929: 259). Lewis does not explicitly mention inference on that page, but it follows from what else he says about inference at other parts of the book, such as when he claims: “The nature of a concept as such is its internal (essential or definitive) relationships with other concepts” (ibid.: 83). He justifies his relative lack of discussion of inference as constituting concepts by noting, “The most important topic in this connection would be the meaning of implication and the nature of inference. But examination of that question would of necessity be too long and complex for inclusion here” (ibid.: 433). To distinguish these a priori concepts from others, Lewis coins the term “categorial” to demarcate them: “‘Categorial’ is used throughout with the meaning ‘pertaining to the categories.’ This avoids possible confusion with meaning specifically ‘unconditional, not hypothetical’” (ibid.: 12, footnote). 6. See (ibid.: 82): “Logical analysis is not dissection but relation; the analysis of A into Band C does not divide A into constituents Band C but merely traces a pattern of relations connecting A with Band C. As regards their conceptual meaning, terms are very closely analogous to points in space. A point is nothing whatever apart from its relation to other points; its very essence is relational. Likewise the conceptual meaning of a term is nothing whatever apart from other such meanings.” This inferential, relational emphasis in Lewis is a point stressed in Baldwin 2007. 7. See among other instances Lewis (ibid.: 87-8): “In such cases the meaning is possessed by the mind both in the sense of this consistently determined attitude and in the further sense that how this meaning should become explicit and what would be recognized as essential, when the attitude became self-conscious, is already implicit in the attitude.” Lewis also claims that “identity of meaning consists practically in implicit modes of behavior , and what is involved in these always runs beyond what can be explicit in consciousness at any one time” (ibid.: 84). 8. As is well known, McDowell carries out his own critique of the myth of the given in terms of Gareth Evans’s defense of a version of it in Mcdowell (1994). 9. See (ibid.: 61, 124). 10. See the discussion of how Lewis’s conception of the given differs fundamentally from the empiricist model often attributed to him in Misak 2013. 11. Lewis (1929: 432): “This, as it seems to me, but serves to emphasize the fact that the conceptual interpretation of experience is, at bottom, something concerning which rationalistic accounts and empiricistic theories are, in their opposite ways, both false, and the pragmatic is the true one.” 12. (Ibid.: 21): “Our categories are guides to action.” And, p. 93: “Our common world is very largely a social achievement – an achievement in which we triumph over a good deal of diversity in sense-experience.” 13. See (ibid.: 113): “‘Like-mindedness’ consists primarily of three things; the possession of like needs and of like modes of behavior in satisfying them, second, the possession of common concepts, represented in behavior by discrimination and relation, and third, the capacity (evoked particularly when community in the other two respects threatens to fail) of transcending our individual limitations of discrimination by indirect methods.” 14. Lewis also notes: “Identity of meaning consists practically in implicit modes of behavior” (ibid.: 84). 15. ( Ibid.: x): “The choice of conceptual systems for such application is instrumental or pragmatic, and empirical truth is never more than probable.” 16. See (ibid.: 117, 58). 17. See (ibid.: 37): “The pure concept and the content of the given are mutually independent; neither limits the other.” Likewise, p. 220: “An absolute and a priori limitation of experience could not be known.” Lewis seems to backpedal on this in one other passage, where he says, “The qualia of the given are the clue to the applicability or inapplicability of concepts and set the the

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limits of conceptual interpretation” (ibid.: 157). If qualia are the content of the given, and the content of the given does not limit the pure concepts, then it is difficult to see how qualia “set the limits of conceptual interpretations.” Perhaps somebody has an idea on how to square the circle on the this, but I tend to think of it as an indication of a basic and irresolvable tension in Lewis’s thought. 18. See (ibid.: 247): “Genuine issues may of logic are those which stand above such questions of the merely self-critical integrity of the logical system. There are such issues, and these cannot be determined – nay, cannot even be argued – except on pragmatic grounds of human bent and intellectual convenience.” 19. This rather constricted conception of the normative goes against the more expansive conception to be found in the “organic pragmatism” of John Dewey’s thought, and against the more expansive view to be found in German idealism. It also runs up against other types of views that argue for a non-representationalist, non-conceptual meaning of “norms” to be found in even simple organic life. For the view that such normativity is conceptually more basic than that of representations, see Burge 2009. 20. As Lewis states his own case: “New ranges of experience such as those due to the invention of the telescope and have actually led to alteration of our categories in historic time […] Categories and concepts do not literally change; they are simply given up and replaced by new ones”(1929: 268). 21. Sellars, Rorty & Brandom 1997. 22. Brandom (2000: 118): “The empiricist tradition is right to emphasize that our capacity to have empirical knowledge begins with and crucially depends on such reliable differential responsive dispositions. But though the story begins with this sort of classification, it does not end there. For the rationalist tradition is right to emphasize that our classificatory responses count as applications of concepts, and hence as so much as candidates for knowledge, only in virtue of their role in reasoning. The crucial difference between the parrot’s utterance of the noise ‘That is red’ and the (let us suppose physically indistinguishable) utterance of a human reporter is that for the latter, but not the former, the utterance has the practical significance of making a claim. Doing that is taking up a normative stance of a kind that can serve as a premise from which to draw conclusions. That is, it can serve as a reason for taking up other stances.” 23. See Rorty 1991. 24. See the discussion of Rorty’s and Davidson’s views in Frank B. Farrell 1994. 25. ( Ibid.: 357-8): “Knowledge of reality serves for the control of experience: without the possibility of control, not only would knowledge be worthless, there would be for us no reality to know.” 26. (Ibid.: 236): “If we should think of mind as what the rationalists suppose – superimposing on reality a rigid mask of form outside which mind itself could never catch a glimpse – then this altogether universal and un-get-overable form could never become self-conscious. It would remain – in Fichte’s phrase – the ‘Great Thought which no man has ever thought’.” 27. Fichte & Breazeale (1988: 122): “Consequently, the of activity of the particular sciences are infinite. Thus an exhaustive Wissenschaftslehre presents no threat to the human mind’s infinite progress toward perfection. The Wissenschaftslehre does not negate this infinite progress; on the contrary, it provides it with a foundation which is totally secure and beyond all doubt. It assigns to the human mind a task which it cannot complete in all eternity.” 28. (Ibid.: 425). 29. (Ibid.: 236-7): “But the categories are not the form of that which, having no alternative and no bounds, is formless. They are the explicit bounds of that which, if it transcend them, must fall into some other category. They are divisions within the comprehensible in general, but not the shape of comprehensibility itself.” 30. See Robert B. Pippin 2005. See also (forthcoming): Robert Pippin 2018.

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31. For an interpretation along that line, see Friedlander 2001, and 2014. 32. “But now it is obvious that if there were not an absolute limit to knowledge – something that, even without our being aware of it, also absolutely fetters us and binds us in knowledge, and that, in the course of knowing never once becomes an object, precisely because It is the principle of all knowledge – then we could simply never arrive at knowledge, even of one solitary thing […] there is an ultimate of some sort, from which all knowledge begins, and beyond which there is no knowledge” (Schelling & Heath, 1978: 16). The resemblance to Schelling is made more curious by Lewis’s one reference to Schelling (in relation to Fichte) in which it is hard to see if he is endorsing Schelling (or probably more likely) adopting a fully ironic tone: “Schelling however, acknowledges the justice of the challenge and seeks to meet it with amazing results. Starting from the Fichtean premise, A = A, he deduces eventually the electrical and magnetic properties of matter!” (Lewis, 1929: 190, footnote). 33. Kant speaks of judgments of the beautiful as where “judgment finds itself referred to something that is both in the subject himself and outside him, something that is neither nature nor freedom and yet is linked with the basis of freedom, the supersensible, in which the theoretical and the practical power are in an unknown manner combined and joined into a unity” (Kant & Pluhar, 1987: §59, p. 229 (354)). 34. See Hegel, Wessels & Clairmont (1988: 552); Hegel & Pinkard (2018: 469). 35. Hegel thus says, “For the sake of freedom, the Idea also has […] the hardest opposition within itself; its being at rest consists in the security and certainty with which it eternally creates and eternally overcomes that being at rest and therein brings itself together with itself” (Hegel & Di Giovanni, 2010: 759). 36. See formulations such as “‘The human mind’ is distinctly a social product, and our categories will reflect that fact […] The human animal with his needs and interests confronts an experience in which these must be satisfied, if at all. Both the general character of the experience and the nature of the animal will be reflected in the mode of behavior which marks this attempt to realize his ends. This will be true of the categories of his thinking as in other things” (Lewis, 1929: 238-9). 37. See Pinkard 2007. 38. See Hegel & Pinkard (2018: ¶177), where Hegel begins with a second-person encounter, “A self-consciousness is for another self-consciousness,” which he then goes to argue culminates in a first-person singular and plural: “[…] in the oppositions of the various self-consciousnesses existing for themselves: The I that is we and the we that is I” (ibid.: 108). 39. Lewis himself resisted that path and in his later work drew closer to the empiricism that was starting to prevail in American philosophy. Clarence Irving Lewis 1947. A good account and more or less a limited defense of it can be found in Misak 2013.

ABSTRACTS

C. I. Lewis’s version of pragmatism, which he called “conceptualistic pragmatism,” has been little studied and is nowadays overlooked, eclipsed by the more famous pragmatisms of Dewey and James. However, it was Lewis’s version that came to dominate the formation of post-1945 pragmatism in the United States. It provided the framework in which Quine (his former student), Sellars, Davidson, Rorty and Brandom operated. Roughly, that structure involved a passive, sensory ineffable given and an ordering and classification of the given by a priori categories.

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Comprehending those categories was a matter of apprehending a priori truths, but those categories were also changeable. Rational change involved giving some up and substituting others to meet certain basic human interests. We thus have the picture of mind and world that culminates in a certain sense in Brandom’s philosophy: External causal inputs linked to an internal normative inferential network which then results in causal outputs of linguistic shape. This is very different from the classical German idealist conception of mind and world, which takes the distinguishability-but-inseparability of concept and sensory intuition as its core.

AUTHOR

TERRY PINKARD

Georgetown University Terry.Pinkard[at]georgetown.edu

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Hegel and the Ethics of Brandom’s Metaphysics

Jonathan Lewis

1. Introduction

1 A key theme of pragmatism during the latter half of the twentieth century has been the critique of the representationalist order of explanation.1 Although the meaning of representationalism depends on which of the philosophical sub-disciplines one chooses to engage with, common consensus (at a certain level of abstraction) is that, for representationalists, semantics comes before pragmatics, specifically, that notions such as reference and truth are explanatorily basic and can account for inference. As a result, and on the basis of a non-deflationary structure of correspondence between representations and states of affairs, those that support the representationalist order usually subscribe to the view that, for our judgments to have a truth-value, it must be possible for the properties of judgments to correspond with or refer to facts, objects or properties “out there” in the world. It is because of this relationship to the world that individuals are able to express conceptual content. For Robert Brandom, one of the figureheads of contemporary pragmatism, the representational relationship between language and the world is not an appropriate starting point for understanding meaning and truth. One of his main tasks is to show that representational ways in which concepts can have contents can be accounted for on a normative basis in accordance with the roles words play in our discursive practices. Conceptual content is determined through use thereby ensuring that meaning is (initially) expressive.

2 Ultimately, for Brandom, metaphysics is deflationary (“the world is understood in the first instance as a collection of facts, not of things; there is nothing that exists outside of the realm of the conceptual” Brandom 2000b: 357). The contents of our concepts lay claim to how the world is. Consequently, the gradual determination of conceptual content in our actual discursive practices goes hand-in-hand with the determination of facts. With the idea that “facts are true claims” – to be explained in terms “common deontic scorekeeping vocabulary” (Brandom 1994: 625-6) – Brandom argues that true

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normative claims represent normative facts in the same way as descriptive sentences. The point is that “apart from our scorekeeping attitudes of attributing and acknowledging such deontic statuses, there are no such statuses, and hence no corresponding normative facts about them” (Brandom 2000b: 365). With this move, Brandom distances himself from the dominant representationalist tradition in order to explain the sense of content bearers in terms of normative pragmatics and inferential semantics. The end result is that semantic notions such as truth and reference can be understood in terms of inferential processes of social determination and not in terms of identifications between representations and states of affairs.

3 Suffice it to say that the majority of commentators have devoted their assessments of Brandom’s work to the metaphysical, semantic and perception-oriented aspects of his account of how semantic notions such as truth and reference can be understood in terms of social norms.2 The fact of the matter is, however, that Brandom draws upon, approximates and supplements key themes in German Idealism in order to explain the roles that social practice, history and tradition perform in the institution of normative statuses and the determination of concepts and facts.3 Although Brandom appropriates themes in German Idealism for predominantly metaphysical ends, these themes have an essential ethical dimension, one that has not been incorporated within his “systematic contemporary philosophical theory” nor has it been sufficiently acknowledged in his “rational reconstruction of some strands of the history of philosophy” (Brandom 2002: 15). This essential ethical dimension has also remained unexplored by the majority of those that have sought to assess Brandom’s normative pragmatics and inferential semantics.4

4 For Brandom, his explanation of socially-determined facts and norms takes shape, initially, through his reading of Kant, who he sees as adopting an “innovative normative conception of ” that helps us to understand the force of normative or deontic statuses like commitment, responsibility and authority (“various kinds of oughts”) (Brandom 2009: 52). But Brandom’s discussions concerning the self-legislation of normative statuses and one’s commitments to, and responsibilities for, conceptual contents develop through a reading of Hegel and the idea that necessary normative statuses are fundamentally social statuses. Brandom supplements his reading of Kant with a reading of Hegel because he believes that normative statuses and practical attitudes (taking someone to be committed, responsible and authoritative) are the bedrock of discursive practice qua social practice. In other words, the social dimension of self-legislation and mutual-relating that Brandom sees as being supplied by Hegel is a necessary condition of the of deontic scorekeeping, a condition that Kant is unable to provide. Brandom’s framework and his appropriation of Hegel for the demands of that framework presuppose the ideal conditions of reciprocal recognitive attitudes between deontic scorekeepers. For Brandom, Hegel’s notion of a “relation of reciprocity” is the basis of sociality in the sense that it provides a structure for particular acts of judgment and discursive practice in general. Furthermore, intersubjective recognitional relations that are sustained in a reciprocal way are also a necessary condition of a dynamic process that brings about the institution of normative statuses, the determination of conceptual contents and the validity of objectivity- claims.

5 What Brandom does not account for in his reading of Hegel and its assimilation to the demands of normative pragmatics and inferential semantics is the idea that the

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recognitive relationships that constitute both the structure and process of the social determination of norms and facts are, for Hegel, ethical relationships. From a Hegelian perspective, Brandom’s framework faces two specific challenges. The first concerns Brandom’s commitment to social , whereby social practices are immune to criticism from the perspective of either an internal participant or an external observer. The second problem concerns Brandom’s inability to offer a sufficient explanation for the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate norms. For Hegel, we can only make sense of such a distinction and thereby attempt to overcome the problem of social positivism by appealing to the differences between genuine responses to normative authority and illegitimate responses in real discursive situations. Such a distinction is grounded in a particular account of freedom as an achieved collective state of normative equality that licenses genuine self-determination. Accordingly, the relation of reciprocity functions as a condition for the possibility of freedom. In order to address the two challenges facing Brandom’s framework, this paper proposes two Hegelian solutions. Firstly, it will be argued that, in real situations (as opposed to ideal ones), questions concerning the validity of our socially-precipitated judgments cannot be considered independently from questions regarding the legitimacy of norms in the context of the ethics of social recognition. Secondly, in order accommodate the distinction between legitimate and unjustifiable norms, a Hegelian solution challenges the notion of a unity of reason that is at the core of Brandom’s normative pragmatics and inferential semantics. Such a solution appeals to the idea that ethical validity (in Hegel’s sense) cannot be conflated with normative validity.

2. Brandom’s Kant: Normative Statuses, Practical Attitudes and Case Law

6 According to Brandom, normative statuses cannot be easily distinguished; commitment, for example, places an obligation or responsibility on someone to do something whereas authority licenses someone to do the very thing that they are responsible for. For Brandom, the reason one cannot make a hard-and-fast distinction between responsibility, commitment and authority is because these normative statuses are bound up with the concept of judgment: Spontaneity, in Kant’s usage, is the capacity to deploy concepts. Deploying concepts is making judgments and endorsing practical maxims. Doing that, we have seen, is committing oneself, undertaking a distinctive sort of discursive responsibility. The positive freedom exhibited by exercises of our spontaneity is just this normative ability: the ability to commit ourselves, to become responsible. It can be thought of as a kind of authority: the authority to bind oneself by conceptual norms. That it is the authority to bind oneself means that it involves a correlative kind of responsibility [ …] It is the responsibility to integrate the commitment one has undertaken with others that serve as reasons for or against it. (Brandom 2009: 59)

7 In short, according to Brandom, Kant understands judgment as committing oneself to deploying concepts and, simultaneously, taking responsibility for the concepts that one deploys as expressions of one’s commitments. In other words, when it comes to “Kant’s core pragmatist commitment,” he “understands judging and willing as taking on distinctive kinds of responsibility. And he understands what one endorses by doing that – judgeable contents and practical maxims – in terms of what one is thereby committing oneself to do, the kind of task-responsibility one is taking on” (ibid.: 52). Furthermore,

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Kant explains the conceptual contents and practical maxims that one endorses by taking on such a responsibility in terms of an authority to bind one’s self to commitments and the conceptual contents of judgments that express those commitments. On the basis that our commitments stand in inferential relations to one another, this kind of authority entails a further responsibility, specifically, the responsibility to integrate commitments and their associated conceptual contents with other commitments and conceptual contents in a kind of normative spider web.

8 For Brandom (après Brandom’s Kant), taking responsibility for the contents of judgment is the basis for a normative understanding of cognitive-practical activity. In judging, we are committing ourselves to deploying concepts, demonstrating our authority to bind ourselves to our objectivity-claims and undertaking responsibilities for the contents of our judgments. These statuses are, therefore, attitude-dependent. They are also normative in the sense that they can be assessed as appropriate or inappropriate, correct or incorrect. In turn, the normative content of a judgment – that which we have committed ourselves to in making a judgment and which our judgment expresses – is attitude-independent and exercises an authority over us insofar as we adopt a practical attitude that recognises that authority. Norms, therefore, arise and are instituted within a pragmatic, inferential and contextual melting pot of both attitude-dependent and attitude-independent commitments, responsibilities, authority and acknowledgment.5

9 Brandom attempts to make the leap from a phenomenalist understanding of normative statuses as instituted by normative attitudes to his explanation of the entwined natures of concepts and facts by invoking a temporally perspectival model for conceptual determination. To understand the temporal dimension of conceptual objectivity and how it fits with his account of deontic scorekeeping, Brandom uses the analogy of applying and determining legal concepts in case law.6 In each new case, a judge decides whether to apply a legal concept. Each application of a legal concept to a new case helps to determine the content of that legal term. For each judgment, the judge adopts a practical attitude of recognising the authority exercised by the commitments of previous judges whose decisions have provided precedents for the application of the same legal concept. Furthermore, the judge also exercises authority over the content of the legal concepts being applied and thereby over future judges, just as past judges have exercised authority over the deciding judge through the latter’s practical attitude that acknowledges their judgments. The judge thereby presents what is, in effect, a “rational reconstruction” of an authoritative tradition insofar as the tradition determines the content of a legal concept and, simultaneously, reveals what that content is and how it ought to be applied. Furthermore, the deciding judge also has a duty to future judges, for they are the ones who will adopt a practical attitude of deciding whether the commitments of the deciding judge were the “right” commitments, thereby choosing whether to acknowledge the prior judgments as authoritative.

10 According to Brandom, the result of a judge’s rational integration of some new commitment via a process of rational recollection is intelligible as her commitments as to “how things really are, objectively, in themselves – as being what [she] takes to be not just an appearance of that reality, but a veridical appearance, one in which things appear as they really are” (Brandom, 2009: 100). In other words, when a judge (case-law or otherwise) takes their current commitments as the culmination of a historical

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process of actual rational integrations of judgments, that judge considers their commitments to be “the reality of which previous constellations of endorsements were ever more complete and accurate appearances” – each previous, precedential episode of rational recollection and integration is “a partial, and only partially correct revelation of things as they are now known (or at least taken) to be” (ibid.). The recollective reconstruction of a tradition of judgments, which makes reality explicit through a judge’s commitments, shows how prior commitments and conceptual contents were not mere appearances; “they did genuinely reveal something of how things really are” (ibid.: 101).

3. Is Brandom’s Hegel Enough?

11 Positioning his normative pragmatics and inferential semantics in relation to the work of Hegel, Brandom perceives the structure and development of his case-law analogy for the social determination of norms and facts as present in embryonic form in Hegel’s practical philosophy. In a remark that seemingly summarises Brandom’s stance on the subject’s freedom in normatively constituted judgments, Hegel suggests that: The substance that knows itself as free, in which absolute ought is just as much being, is real as the spirit of a people. The abstract disruption of this spirit is its separation in , however, the spirit is the inner power and necessity of that independence. The person, as thinking intelligence, knows that substance as their essence, and ceases in this conviction to be an accident of it […] The person does their duty, without selective reflection, as their duty and as something that is and has in this necessity their self and their real freedom. (GW 20: § 514)7

12 Hegel suggests that “real” freedom is constituted by our commitments to “real” and “necessary” “oughts.” A person that understands that they are free in this sense knows that their freedom as “the spirit of a people” is a duty to “real” and “necessary” norms and to the normative realm of “being” in general. Furthermore, if we read this paragraph through the Brandomian lens of normative statuses, these “oughts” are fundamentally social statuses. Mirroring Brandom’s case-law analogy, we are able to make judgments only by binding ourselves, collectively and individually, to the norms implicit in discursive practices. Part of our “essence” involves taking responsibility for discursive norms (in the sense of integrating our judgments within a reason-giving context of past, present and future commitments of others) and committing ourselves to being bound by such norms.

13 In light of Brandom’s projection of normative pragmatics onto the mirror of history, Brandom’s Hegel is thoroughly post-Kantian. Brandom’s Hegel respects Kant’s critique of transcendental arguments and metaphysical excursions. Moreover, Brandom’s Hegel focuses on the normative statuses of commitment, responsibility and authority and the idea that freedom is necessarily self-legislated. If Brandom’s Hegel appears to be criticising Kant, then the critique is centred not on Kant’s use of the concepts of pure understanding, but on the “autonomy model” for the bindingness of normative statuses and conceptual content. Because the content of a judgment must have an authority that is independent of the responsibility that the judge takes for it, Brandom’s Hegel’s conception of normative statuses as social statuses attempts to solve the aporia that results when Brandom’s Kant tries to maintain the relative independence of normative attitude and normative content according to an autonomy model that only allows for the individual attitudes of those who are judging. The issue

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is that it is not enough for me to endorse norms in the sense of allowing them to exercise an authority over me; my acknowledgment of certain norms is also a commitment in the eyes of others to attitude-independent normative content that will “outrun” my current understanding. Therefore, even though we endorse a certain commitment when making a judgment, the content of that commitment is not entirely attitude-dependent. The institution of normative content demands a particular structure and a particular process that involves one’s self and those others who determine the normative content that one is unable to grasp on one’s own. For Brandom, Hegel’s articulation of “real” freedom is characteristic of the structure and process of deontic scorekeeping, that is, the structure and process involved in mutually and dynamically holding discursive practitioners to account in the socially-situated, implicit game of commitment-making, a game that is made explicit in the giving and asking for reasons. Furthermore, if these “real” and “necessary” “oughts” qua normative statuses are social statuses, then, according to Brandom, mutually and dynamically holding one another to account involves “socially perspectival normative attitudes of attributing and undertaking such commitments” (Brandom, 1994: 62).8

14 For Brandom, the move from Kant’s autonomy model to Hegel’s social model takes place when the notions of commitment, responsibility and authority are incorporated within a symmetrical structure and dynamic process of reciprocal recognition. It is not enough that I merely undertake responsibilities and acknowledge others as having authority over me; others must hold me responsible and exercise authority over what I am committed to, responsible for and authoritative about. Furthermore, because social statuses are instituted through normative, practical attitudes that, according to Brandom, necessarily involve a multiplicity of social perspectives, and because others are holding me responsible for what I am committed to, I must also hold myself responsible. As a scorekeeper with a certain social perspective, it is my “duty” to assess, challenge and revise my own commitments just as it is my duty and the duty of all scorekeepers to assess, challenge and revise the commitments of other scorekeepers and the commitments that “outrun” those that are explicitly acknowledged. The key issue for Brandom and Brandom’s Hegel is that the structure and process that constitute a being capable of judgment are social and reciprocal.9 Simultaneously, the same structure and process of reciprocal recognition synthesizes a normative community of those recognised by and who, in turn, recognise a -responsive individual. In other words, the application of concepts and the institution of genuine normative statuses are based on a social process of reciprocal recognition on the part of those becoming responsible and those holding others responsible, a process that, simultaneously, synthesizes a community capable of judgment – a community that Brandom’s Hegel calls Geist.

15 Just as case-law judges rationally integrate a legal concept via a process of rational recollection, thereby giving rise to a temporally perspectival structure for the determination of legal concepts, the structure of reciprocal recognition that institutes normative statuses also includes a dynamic, temporal aspect. According to Brandom, Hegel presents a retrospective notion of rationally reconstructing the process that led to the commitments currently being integrated. This is “a genealogical justification or vindication of those commitments, showing why previous judgments were correct in the light of still earlier ones – and in a different sense, also in the light of subsequent ones” (Brandom, 2009: 90). According to Brandom’s Hegel, the structure of reciprocal recognition takes the form of a “historical-developmental process” whereby the

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institution of normative statuses, conceptual contents and facts takes place by considering – mutually and symmetrically – “prospective and retrospective temporal recognitive perspectives” (ibid.: 93). In other words, when the structure of reciprocal recognition takes the special form of a developmental process through history, what is presented is a historically-aware social community for whom conceptual contents and discursive commitments can become elevated to the status of facts. According to Brandom, what Hegel presents is a “phenomenology” insofar as “he starts with an account of phenomena (what things are for consciousness) and seeks to reconstruct the notion of noumena (what things are in themselves) out of the resources it provides” (ibid.: 99-100). Specifically, Hegel’s “idea of noumena, of things as they are in themselves, the reality that appears in the form of phenomena, can be understood practically in terms of a distinctive role in a recollectively rationally reconstructed historical sequence of phenomena” (ibid.: 99; italics added).

16 The issue is that the reciprocal recognitive relationship is not just a social phenomenon. The “phenomenal” interpretation of the relation of reciprocity is justified by Hegel on the basis of his speculative logic (and its aims for systematic completion and unity). It is this logical element that invites an engagement with the ethical dimension of Hegel’s practical philosophy, a dimension that remains unaccounted for in Brandom’s Hegel and that has not been incorporated within Brandom’s model of normative pragmatics and inferential semantics. One might argue, of course, that because Brandom’s philosophical historiography involves “selection, supplementation and approximation” (Brandom, 2002: 111), he need only draw upon those ideas and solutions congenial for his own enterprise. If Brandom can adequately explain the sense of content bearers in terms of normative pragmatics and inferential semantics, then why should he concern himself with more substantive speculative and ethical matters? Firstly, it is not clear that Hegel’s systematic approach warrants a more piecemeal reading and application.10 Secondly, putting aside questions of textual fidelity, Brandom’s framework faces two entwined challenges when considered in the light of real discursive practices: a) the problem of social positivism; b) the lack of a reasonable explanation for the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate norms.

17 In order to understand not only how these two Hegelian problems arise for Brandom (and Brandom’s Hegel), but how Hegel deals with them, one needs to understand the implications of the latter’s speculative logic for Brandom’s Hegel (and, by extension, for Brandom’s framework).

18 As we have seen, based on a “Whiggish,” temporally perspectival model, it is the idea that the noumenal – how things really are – emerges from out of the phenomenal – the realm of the social – which Brandom sees as being articulated in the work of Hegel. However, the key issue for Hegel is the truth that the relata of judgment and judged, of practical attitude and normative status, of norms and facts, are constituted and connected by a more fundamental “truth,” one that lies between the relata as “the third to being and essence, to the immediate and to reflection” (GW 12: §11). What makes Hegel’s position more substantive is the fact that his criticisms of representationalism, finite cognition based on the categories of traditional logic and the doctrine of isolable and independent things-in-themselves can only be justified by articulating an “absolute foundation” and “truth” (GW 12: §11). Ultimately, for Hegel, this “third” will take the

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form of the “Concept”; “the totality resulting from the relation of reciprocity” (ibid.: §15; italics added). The upshot of this “truth,” as Stephen Houlgate observes (2007: 149), is that empirical conceptual norms may be socially instituted, but fundamental categories like Hegel’s “Concept” are necessary by virtue of the dialectical character of thought, a character that cannot be transcendently or socially explained.

19 Hegel’s position on “representational success” is just as critical as Brandom’s. However, Hegel’s position on the negation of the independent being of everything other than the self-conscious “I” can only be explained by appealing to the “absolute foundation” that operates as the truth in his framework. He explains that the notion of an independent fact, object or property, which both mind and language somehow represent, lacks any “being-for-itself.” It lacks an “essential character” that “distinguishes it from all others” in such a way that it is “in opposition to other things” (PG: §125).11 For Hegel, “ being and essence no longer have determination as being and essence, nor are they only in such a unity in which each would mirror the other” (GW 12: §29). At best, the idea that both mind and language mirror an independent reality is merely derivative as a modification of consciousness. As Brady Bowman observes, the key point of this particular approach to idealism is that, as an articulation of the dialectical character of thought, it cannot achieve an expression of reality in accordance with anything like being-for-itself. In short, there is no “stable, objective expression” of dialectical thinking with which mind and language can correspond (Bowman, 2013: 137).12 Rather, Hegel argues that what is established is an object’s “continuity with others, and for it to be connected with others is to cease to exist on its own account” (PG: §125). He goes on to claim that: It is just through the absolute character of the thing and its opposition to others that it relates itself to others, and it is essentially only this relating. The relation, however, is the negation of the thing’s independence, and it is thus really the essential property of the thing that is its undoing. (Ibid.)

20 In short, the notion of an independent object, which both mind and language represent, is undermined by that object’s “essential property”; its relationship with other objects. It is this essential necessary relationship that, for Hegel, calls into question the traditional metaphysical conception of “being-for-itself.”

21 Translating Hegel’s rejection of a mind-independent reality into Brandom’s terms, “how things really are, objectively, in themselves” is essentially mediated by its relation to integrating and recollecting consciousness, which is itself mediated by its relation to the reality related to acts of judgment. Therefore, both judgment and what is being judged are relational through and through such that reality – that which is rationally integrated through rational recollection – is “essentially only this relating.” In other words, two relata (judgment and judged) are essentially involved such that judgment is a relation and that which is judged is also a relation. Furthermore, not only is the judgment-relation related to what is judged, that which is judged is related to judgment in order to relate to itself and thereby constitute the self-relation it essentially is. Accordingly, judgment is, simultaneously, a complex structure and process whose elements are defined in purely relational terms such that the whole structure-cum- process is itself a relation, which Hegel calls the “Concept.” Following his critique of the notion of “being-for-itself,” Hegel argues that “the Concept does not differentiate itself into determinations” (GW 12: §29). Rather, the Concept is “ the truth of the substantial relation” – the relation of reciprocity – whereby “being and essence

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individually attain their perfect independence and determination through the other” (ibid.).13

22 The upshot of this aspect of Hegel’s speculative logic is that the content of the “truth” of concepts, that is, the “relation of reciprocity,” cannot be normatively determined – it is necessary. For Hegel, we need some sort of guarantee that the basic structure of our social norms has been instituted in ways consistent with such a “truth.” Broadly speaking, it is the manifestation of the “relation of reciprocity” at the social level that offers such a guarantee. Consequently, although the contents of judgment may be socially-achieved, partial and progressive normative facts, the institution of “real” or genuine normative statuses, the determination of “real” or genuine normative content and the assumption of a “task-responsibility” on the part of those engaged in judgment presupposes the actualisation of a historical-developmental process of mutual relating between deontic scorekeepers, a dynamic process that Hegel calls “becoming” (GW 12: §33). In other words, the “relation of reciprocity” not only provides a necessary structure for particular acts of judgment, it is also a necessary condition of a dynamic process that brings about the institution of “real” and “necessary” normative statuses and the determination of “real” and “necessary” conceptual contents.

23 Brandom is prepared to subscribe to the idea that a necessary condition of the institution of normative statuses is the actualisation of reciprocal, practical attitudes between deontic scorekeepers.14 However, unlike Hegel, he does not grant the relation of reciprocity an ethical reading. For Brandom, it is enough for his general account of normativity (and his rational reconstruction of the history of philosophy along those lines) that he provides a sufficient view of sociality. On that basis, the structure and process of reciprocal recognition, which, according to Brandom, involves socially perspectival normative attitudes of attributing and undertaking commitments, is merely what is needed to account for sociality and to cross the boundary between the natural and the normative.15 For Hegel, however, sociality cannot be considered separately from ethics, specifically, “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit). In Hegel’s account, the relation of reciprocity functions as a condition for the possibility of freedom. Hegel conceives freedom not as a property, a causal capacity nor as a matter of responding to contingent desires or external pressures, but as a collective achievement of a “state” of mutual relating between social beings.16 This state should not be interpreted as a relation of utility, mutual necessity or in terms of a legal notion of mutuality of recognition. Furthermore, the relation of reciprocity should not just be conceived in terms of equal status between morally responsible subjects in the sense of mutual welfare respect or respect of moral intentionality. For Hegel, the state of freedom is necessary for social beings to engage each other on a genuine normative basis. In his reading of Kant, Brandom (2009: 58) acknowledges the fact that “positive freedom,” as a “freedom to do something, rather than freedom from some sort of constraint,” is expressed by a subject’s normative ability to make commitments, to become responsible and to bind itself to conceptual norms. For Hegel, however, the key issue is that such an expression of positive freedom – true self-determination – requires the achievement of a state of concrete normative interactive equality. As Pippin (2008: 198) observes, “being a free rational agent consists in being recognised as one, and one can only be so recognised if the other’s recognition is freely given; and this effectively means only if I recognise the other as a free individual, as someone to be addressed in normative not strategic terms.” In other words, true sociality of competent concept appliers presupposes a state of freedom consisting of reciprocal relations between

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normative social beings. For Hegel, the relation of reciprocity is ethical (and not just a condition of sociality) because without the manifestation of such a relation a subject is unable to engage genuinely in the normative game of giving as asking for reasons and, on that basis, a subject cannot genuinely self-determine or genuinely be who he or she is.

24 According to Hegel, by responding to normative statuses and normative contents in acts of judgments and the game of giving and asking for reasons, we do not deliberate as rational agents but as “ethical beings” (sittliches Wesen) in a form of “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit) of recognitive relationships.17 For Hegel, both the game of giving and asking for reasons and our genuine commitments and responsibilities to the “real” and “necessary” “oughts” of that game presuppose the conditions of ethical intersubjective relating that is reciprocal through and through. The recognitive relationship cannot be coerced. Moreover, from a Hegelian perspective, judges and scorekeepers cannot be indifferent to this ethical dimension without calling into question the justifiability of their practical attitudes and their contribution to the determination of normative statuses, and without losing their hold on their judgments as genuine, justifiable or legitimate normative claims about the way the world is.

25 Hegel attempts to make some sort of systematic sense of the distinction between those concrete social structures and processes that institute legitimate social norms and those that bring about unjustifiable social norms. It is because he provides the means to ground this distinction in his theory of freedom, specifically, in the collective achievement of a state of reciprocal recognitive relationships, that an explanation can be offered for the differences between behaviour resulting from coercion and genuine norm-responsive behaviour. However, Brandom does not consider the implications of Hegel’s ethical dimension of sociality. As we shall see, this is one way of explaining the first issue with Brandom’s framework, namely: Commentators suggest that he is committed to a kind of social positivism that forces deontic scorekeepers to merely accept social practices as immune to criticism.18

26 Whereas Hegel can be interpreted as making a distinction between legitimate social norms derived from reciprocal recognitive relationships between “ethical beings” and illegitimate norms that emerge out of non-recognitive relationships of domination, Brandom is unable to sufficiently explain the distinctions between legitimate and unjustifiable norms and between practical attitudes and normative statuses. Such an explanation is lacking in Brandom’s account because he overlooks the distinction between coerced behaviour and genuine norm-responsive behaviour that is a key aspect of Hegel’s account of social practice as a “struggle for recognition,” a struggle that can only be resolved by reciprocal recognitive relationships constitutive of an achieved collective state of freedom. This leads to the second issue with Brandom’s framework: Without a reasonable explanation for the distinction between justifiable and unjustifiable social norms, Brandom’s model is unable to explain why, rather than establishing a Sittlichkeit of successful mutual recognition and normative equality that justifies the conflation of norms and facts, social recognition, in many cases, appears to facilitate attitudes that conform to unjust normative practices.19

27 From a Hegelian perspective, these two issues arise for Brandom because “Making It Explicit is officially silent on this topic [of ethical commitments]. The words ‘’ and ‘ethics’ (like ‘experience’) do not so much as occur in this long book” (Brandom, 2000b: 371). There appears to be two reasons for such silence. Firstly, as already

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mentioned, in order to offer a general account of normativity, Brandom believes that it is sufficient to explain sociality in terms of mutually and dynamically holding one another to account through “socially perspectival normative attitudes of attributing and undertaking such commitments.” On that basis, as already demonstrated, Brandom’s framework and his appropriation of Hegel for the demands of that framework presuppose the ideal conditions of reciprocal recognitive attitudes between deontic scorekeepers. Secondly, according to Brandom, the omission of ethical considerations is required in order that “some ground might be gained by addressing discursive norms undistracted by the special features historically treated as distinctive of moral ones” (ibid.). According to Brandom, we cannot have contentful moral attitudes (and contentful moral for action) before we have a discursive practice and the norms implicit in that practice. As we have seen, content is conferred upon a concept by the commitments a judgment both acknowledges and expresses. These commitments are part of a normative practice that involve inferential relationships. Prior to this practice, all we encounter, according to Brandom, are various perceptual behavioural dispositions. Consequently, from Brandom’s perspective, in order to have moral content, we require a certain amount of conceptual content in general as well as discursive norms. We also require that the normative social practice is already underway. Such an interpretive issue may seem to rule out the Hegelian possibility that genuine normative sociality presupposes normative equality in the recognitive interactions between social beings. However, there are reasons for thinking that this is not the case and that the challenges facing Brandom’s account are, from a Hegelian point of view, genuine problems.

28 Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, the concept of the “ethical” is to be interpreted in the light of Hegel’s theory of freedom. According to this theory, in order to be a rational, normative and norm-responsive subject, who is able to institute genuine normative statuses and partake genuinely in the normative game of giving and asking for reasons, that subject must be free. In order to be free, that subject must be recognised as a rational, normative and norm-responsive subject, who is able to institute genuine normative statuses and partake genuinely in the normative game of giving and asking for reasons. Furthermore, that recognition must be freely given in the sense that those doing the recognising are recognised in the same way. In other words, there must be an achievement of some collective state of freedom consisting of a structure-cum-process of mutuality of recognition indicative of normative equality. On this reading, the ethical dimension of Hegel’s practical philosophy should not be interpreted in some property-based, matter-of-fact or metaphysical sense that precedes discursive practice and the norms implicit in that practice. Furthermore, on the basis that freedom should be understood as a state of specifically normative equality, the ethics of mutual recognition cannot be interpreted solely in legal and moral terms. In other words, for the achievement of normative equality it is not enough that the recognitive relationship consist in mutual respect between morally- responsible, rights-bearing social beings. Indeed, in a certain sense, Hegel echoes Brandom’s concerns about “distinctive” moral norms. The point is that without an “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit) in which social beings recognise, and are recognised as, rational, normative and norm-responsive subjects, the notion of contentful moral or legal attitudes will appear empty.20

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29 Another reason for believing that Hegel’s theory of freedom raises questions regarding Brandom’s framework is that whereas Brandom aims to offer an account of the normativity of discursive practices based on the ideal conditions of reciprocal recognitive attitudes between deontic scorekeepers, Hegel sees the development of normative situations over time as being more relevant. Because Hegel is more concerned with the actualisation of normative authority at specific times, the continuous historical development of norms and, indeed, historical processes of normative change, the Brandomian problem of the origin of the ethical dimension of normative social practice is not as relevant as the systematic explanation of the distinction between justifiable and unjustifiable social norms. Under the ideal conditions of reciprocal recognition between deontic scorekeepers, such a distinction, for Hegel, is of little or no relevance. Consequently, there is little or no need to consider the ethical implications and dimensions of normative social practice. From Hegel’s perspective, however, “ethical life” and discursive norms do not come apart. Furthermore, they cannot, in real discursive situations, be conflated in the name of an ideal discursive rationality.21 That the two are interrelated is an idea I will explore in the next section.

4. The Justifiability of Norms

30 In the previous section I argued that Brandom accepts reciprocal, practical attitudes between deontic scorekeepers as a necessary condition for the institution of normative statuses. However, when it comes to real judgments, it is precisely the legitimacy of socially-instituted norms of judgment that is under consideration. In concrete circumstances, genuine normative statuses, judgments and reasons arrived at through a rational22 process of integration and recollection can conflict with those norms derived from non-reciprocal recognitive relationships that undermine normative equality, for example, through coercion and manipulation or as a result of generic measurement, bureaucratic organisation, the social privileging of utilitarian attitudes and various reifying stereotypes (of race, class, , sex, disability, mental health, psychology, and so on).23

31 The key issue is that if we are to accept Brandom’s explanation for the social determination of normative statuses, conceptual contents and facts as based on a model of reciprocal recognition, then, from a Hegelian perspective, questions concerning normative validity in real situations cannot be considered separately from the ethics of social recognition. This is a substantive point for Hegel, who, on one reading, suggests that the question of the content of judgment cannot be considered independently from the question of the authority of judgment, that is, independently from the question of whether a judgment is justifiable.24

32 As we have seen, Brandom is also concerned with the question of normative authority. By making the distinction between commitments and entitlements, he gestures at the dialectical interplay between responsibility and authority in the context of judgment. In a normative discursive context, however, Brandom’s notion of authority is solely concerned with the practice of binding one’s self to commitments and conceptual contents. For those that accuse Brandom of committing to social positivism, his notion of authority lacks an additional dimension that explains how discursive participants can justifiably call into question claims to normative authority. The reason why

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Brandom’s framework can explain how authority licenses someone to bind themselves to conceptual norms but not how a person can challenge normative authority is because, as we have seen, Brandom’s model for the institution of normative statuses assumes the ideal conditions of sociality. In order to justifiably criticise social norms, we need a gap to appear between legitimate social norms and unjustifiable social norms. At the structural level, if we assume that the ideal conditions of reciprocal recognition hold, the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate norms will be explanatorily empty. For Hegel, we can only make sense of such a distinction by appealing to the differences between genuine responses to normative authority and those responses that, even if they involve commitments, acknowledgements and attitudinal endorsements in the game of giving and asking for reasons, arise from coercive or manipulative discursive environments. As we have seen, Hegel is able to offer a broader account of normative authority, one that attempts to overcome the problem of social positivism, by making systematic sense of the distinction between coerced and genuine self-determining, norm-responsive behavior on the basis of his theory of freedom. For Hegel, we cannot assume that in every appeal to normative authority the ideal state of reciprocal recognition has been achieved. In order to understand the ways in which the content of a judgment is bound up with its authority, we need to see not only how that relationship manifests in real circumstances, but how those circumstances relate to a state of concrete normative interactive equality.

33 From a Hegelian perspective, what makes non-recognitive relationships qua practices of domination a very powerful and a very real enemy of Brandom’s normative pragmatics is their ability to undermine the validity of normative statuses and conceptual contents in specific situations and at certain times. Furthermore, non- recognitive social practices can also call into question Brandom’s conception of positive freedom as self-legislation, which forms the basis of his account of the institution of normative statuses and the social determination of conceptual contents. For example, domination can be said to operate by subjecting individuals to unjust normative forces beyond their control, which those individuals, nevertheless, institute by undertaking commitments in the name of recognition and in order to play the game of giving and asking for reasons. Due to the fact that commitments, responsibilities and authorities that result from violations of the principle of reciprocal recognition can still be acknowledged as normative statuses over time such that they seemingly legitimatise the non-reciprocal ways in which subjects deal with each other within various social relationships, a Hegelian approach considers whether normative statuses, conceptual contents and facts actually disguise non-reciprocal processes and structures of recognition.

34 If Brandom’s pragmatic inferentialism assumes a one-dimensional account of normative authority on the basis of ideal conditions of sociality, then, in order to adapt it for the real conditions of everyday discursive practices, Hegel’s distinction between unjustifiable and justifiable appeals to normative validity needs to be accounted for within Brandom’s model. To argue, as Fossen (2011) does, that real discursive practice is “contestatory” is to misunderstand or overlook Hegel’s substantive point that the content of judgment cannot be considered independently from the question of the authority of the judgment. Even if it is the case that there is an essential and underappreciated “agonal” dimension to Brandom’s conception of discursive practice,25 one that allows him “to avoid the pitfalls of subjectivism and communal assessment” and to avoid “collapsing the distinction between normative statuses and practical

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attitudes at the individual or communal level” (Fossen, 2011: 385-6), such a dimension (on its own) cannot provide an account of how one might go about adjudicating on the justifiability of something that is taken to be normatively valid.26 As has already been mentioned, for Hegel, to adjudicate on the justifiability of claims to normative authority, we need to draw upon the distinction between genuine appeals to normative authority and unjustifiable appeals. On the basis that Hegel grounds such a distinction in his theory of freedom, it is only when we understand that “ethical life” discourse is essentially “agonal” that we can begin to make sense of real distinction between legitimate and illegitimate discursive norms. “Ethical life” discourse does not assume that the reciprocal recognitive relationships constitutive of an achieved collective state of freedom hold. Rather, “ethical life” discourse occurs in a practical context of a “struggle for recognition.”

35 Due to the fact that Brandom’s framework assumes the unity of normative and empirical validity and presupposes ideal conditions of reciprocal recognition, the task of accommodating the distinction between legitimate and unjustifiable appeals to normative validity within his framework is both a critical and controversial undertaking. It goes against the notion of a unity of reason that is at the core of Brandom’s normative pragmatics and inferential semantics.27 By making such a distinction, we understand that it is possible that what is taken to be normatively valid may have emerged from – in Hegel’s sense – ethically invalid social environments of non- reciprocal recognition. On that basis, we might revise Brandom’s claims and suggest that a unity of reason under ideal conditions presupposes the relative autonomy of empirical, normative and ethical validity. However, were we to argue for the autonomy of ethical, normative and empirical validity, Brandom could not be expected to provide a deflationary metaphysics on the basis of scorekeeping attitudes of attributing and acknowledging normative statuses and the social determination of conceptual contents. In order to sacrifice the regulative assumption of an integration of different spheres of validity under ideal conditions so as to account for Hegel’s distinction between unjustifiable and justifiable appeals to normative validity, the remaining option is to argue that although each sphere of validity (empirical, normative, and ethical) is attendant upon certain features specific to it, these features are interrelated with those that have been attributed to other types of validity. In other words, the seemingly autonomous or conflated spheres of validity are reciprocally related to the degree that concrete moves within one sphere (for example, moves that undermine an ideal collective state of normative equality qua reciprocal recognition) can affect the content of what is taken to be normatively valid. This is the substantive point that, as we have seen, Hegel appears to be committed to, namely, that the content of discursive expressions cannot be considered separately from the question of the authority of those expressions that have been acknowledged in specific ways at specific times.

36 Bearing in mind that, for Hegel, genuine (as opposed to coerced) responses to normative statuses and normative contents require that discursive practitioners deliberate as “ethical beings” in a form of “ethical life” of recognitive relationships, a Hegelian solution demands that practitioners make specific moves within the sphere of “ethical life” in order to achieve a collective state of reciprocal recognition qua normative equality that is necessary for genuine normative self-determination and thereby for the institution of genuine normative statuses and conceptual contents. Furthermore, unless we are to make the mistake of conflating normative and ethical validity, there must be something about the “ethical life” sphere of validity that is not

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currently provided by Brandom’s account of how norms and facts emerge from social practices.28

37 In the spirit of Hegel’s concept of “struggle for recognition,” what sets a claim to normative validity in “ethical life” apart from a claim to normative validity in a positivist context is its inherently contestatory character. “Ethical life” arguments can be viewed as concerned almost exclusively with the articulation of specific situations, which are attendant upon actions and needs, as well as with the way that those who act or suffer normative consequences of actions see themselves. As Albrecht Wellmer has observed, the arguments and judgments that take place in a Hegelian context of “ethical life” are fallible because the validity of such discourse is often a matter of whether “my understanding of situations, the way I see myself, my interpretations, are appropriate, accurate or truthful” (Wellmer, 1986: 125). In other words, with “ethical life” arguments and judgments, one confronts one’s self and, simultaneously, evaluates the features of the situation one finds one’s self in. Therefore, the issue is not only whether a social norm, in real situations, is taken by scorekeepers to be justifiable, but also whether the judgment-maker interprets it as being justifiable in the context of their specific experiences at specific times. In Brandom’s terms, it is the “subjective” nature of de dicto interpretations (as opposed to the “objective” character of de re interpretations) that allow for this fallibilistic character of “ethical life” judgments (although, if we adopt an evaluative or hermeneutic model, what is “subjective” and what is “objective” cannot be distinguished in real dialogical situations of moral deliberation in the ways in which Brandom attempts to).29 Utilising Brandom’s terms (but not his ideas), claims to normative validity in “ethical life” are special because they are initially concerned with what the individual takes to follow and what she takes to be incompatible as opposed to the commitments she actually undertakes according to those who acknowledge and recognise the individual’s commitments. In other words, de dicto interpretations of real situations in “ethical life” are “what the author took it that she was committing herself to by making a certain claim, what she would have regarded as evidence for it or against it […] So [the claim] tells us something about how she understood what she was claiming” (Brandom, 2002: 96). On this basis, an evaluative stance not only opens up the possibility that we may have something to learn from social norms, it demands that our concrete experiences at specific times can call into question and bring about a revision of those norms as result of our specific interpretations that express those experiences.

38 In many cases, interpretations that express specific experiences will make use of justifiable exceptions to social norms. Taking moral discursive norms as an example, if we imagine a situation in which moral norms have emerged from contexts of domination, then challenging such norms will require moral arguments derived from specific experiences at specific times that bring exceptions into play, exceptions that cannot be made to conform to these norms. From a Hegelian perspective, these exceptions will be normatively legitimate or justifiable if they promote conditions of mutual recognition necessary for genuine normative self-determination and normative equality. The key point is that claims to validity in “ethical life” are not entirely norm- bound. The legitimacy of norms in “ethical life” only stretches as far as the legitimacy of the recognitive relationships that exist between discursive practitioners. As a result, “ethical life” norms carry a situational index that binds them to the specific situations in which they have their origins.30 What makes claims to normative validity in “ethical life” so important in terms of the present discussions regarding the need for, rather

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than the presence of, an achieved collective state of normative equality as the basis for the institution of genuine normative statuses and conceptual contents, is that it allows for the questioning and transcendence of what is considered to be normatively valid as a result of the exceptions that are brought into play in specific situations of judgment.

39 Without the actualisation of reciprocal recognition that grounds the legitimacy of genuine normative statuses, conceptual contents and facts, what Hegel calls “the march of reason” is less an unbroken, “Whiggish” progress towards truth and correct representation of reality, but more a question of extending relationships of mutual recognition qua normative equality through the critical undermining of socially inherited attitudes and illegitimate social norms. This (all-too-brief) account of normative validity in the context of “ethical life” is, from a Hegelian perspective, vital for dealing with the spectre of positivism that threatens Brandom’s framework. Indeed, if the speculative logic of Hegel’s Concept is the “truth” he claims it to be, the more we actualise and promote reciprocal recognition within an “ethical life,” the more that form of life emerges as a rational culture.

5. Conclusion

40 In this paper, I have attempted to demonstrate that Brandom’s normative pragmatics and inferential semantics presupposes the ideal conditions of sociality qua reciprocal recognition. Although Brandom admits to not having addressed the ethical issues that are entwined with his reading and appropriation of Hegel, we have seen that one way to deal with some of the issues concerning Brandom’s framework is to argue that discursive rationality cannot be isolated from a form of mutually-recognising “ethical life.” Consequently, from a Hegelian perspective, I argued that, in real situations, questions concerning normative validity must be understood in the context of our actual practices involving social recognition, which may or may not be justifiable according to the model of genuine mutuality qua normative equality. Rather than conflating normative and ethical validity in the name of an ideal , were we to acknowledge that what is normatively valid may conflict with what we understand to be (in Hegel’s sense) ethically valid, the task presented to us by the evaluative-cum-situational nature of claims to normative validity in “ethical life” would be to use our specific experiences that bring exceptions into play in order to question and (potentially) transcend what we consider to be normatively valid with the view to instigating and spreading relationships of reciprocal recognition.

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MCDOWELL John, (2009), The Engaged Intellect: Philosophical Essays, Cambridge, MA and London, The MIT Press.

MISAK Cheryl, (1998), “Deflating Truth,” The Monist, 81 (3), 407-25.

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MISAK Cheryl, (2007), “Pragmatism and Deflationism,” in Cheryl Misak (ed.), New Pragmatists, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 68-90.

PINKARD Terry, (2007), “Was Pragmatism the Successor to Idealism?,” in Cheryl Misak (ed.), New Pragmatists, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 142-68.

PIPPIN Robert B., (2005), “Brandom’s Hegel,” European Journal of Philosophy, 13 (3), 381-408.

PIPPIN Robert B., (2008), Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

PRICE Huw, (2011), Naturalism Without Mirrors, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

PRICE Huw, (2013), Expressivism, Pragmatism and Representationalism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

PRIEN Bernd, (2010), “Robert Brandom on Communication, Reference, and Objectivity,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 18 (3), 433-58.

PUTNAM Hilary, (1981), Reason, Truth and History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

PUTNAM Hilary, (1985), Realism and Reason, vol. 3 of Philosophical Papers, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

PUTNAM Hilary, (1988), Representation and Reality, Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press.

PUTNAM Hilary, (1992), Renewing Philosophy, Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press.

RAMBERG Bjørn, (2000), “Post-ontological Philosophy of Mind: Rorty versus Davidson,” in Robert B. Brandom (ed.), Rorty and His Critics, Oxford, Blackwell, 351-69.

RAMBERG Bjørn, (2008), “Rorty, Davidson, and the Future of Metaphysics in America,” in Cheryl Misak (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 430-48.

REDDING Paul, (2007), Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

RORTY Richard, (1979), Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press.

RORTY Richard, (1982), Consequences of Pragmatism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

RORTY Richard, (1991), Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

STOUT Jeffrey, (2007), “On Our Interest in Getting Things Right: Pragmatism without Narcissism,” in Cheryl Misak (ed.), New Pragmatists, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 7-31.

VAN FRAASSEN Bas C., (1980), The Scientific Image, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

WEISS Bernard & Jeremy WANDERER (eds.), (2010), Reading Brandom: On Making It Explicit, New York and London, Routledge.

WELLMER Albrecht, (1986), Ethik und Dialog: Elemente des moralischen Urteils bei Kant und in der Diskursethik, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp.

WILLIAMS Meredith, (2000), “Wittgenstein and Davidson on the Sociality of Language,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 30 (3), 299-318.

WILLIAMS Meredith, (2010), Blind Obedience: Paradox and Learning in the Later Wittgenstein, New York and London, Routledge.

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WILLIAMS Michael, (2010), “Pragmatism, Minimalism, Expressivism,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 18 (3), 317-30.

NOTES

1. See, for example, Price 2011, 2013; Putnam 1981, 1985, and 1992; Ramberg 2000, 2008; Rorty (1979; 1982: 160-75; and 1991: 1-17, 113-61); Stout 2007; van Fraassen 1980. 2. See, for example, Lance 2008; McDowell 1999; Prien 2010; Redding (2007: 56-84); Weiss & Wanderer (eds.) 2010; Williams, Michael 2010. 3. For a discussion of Brandom’s approach to philosophical historiography, see Brandom (2002: 1-17). 4. For discussions of some of the social and political implications of Brandom’s framework, see Loeffler 2017, Fossen 2011, and Pippin 2005. 5. See Brandom (2009: 52-77). 6. Although, as Loeffler (2018: 201-29) demonstrates, Brandom’s account of the objectivity of conceptual norms is structurally multisided, I have chosen to focus on the case-law analogy. According to Brandom, it is this dimension of his own account that is the most recognisably Hegelian. That said, I do touch on other aspects of Brandom’s account, including semantic (a key theme in Hegel) and the distinction between correct applications of concepts and applications that are merely taken to be correct (again, another central theme in Hegel). Such a focus is, I believe, sufficient to deal with the issues I wish to raise in this paper. 7. GW stands for Hegel’s Gesammelte Werke. The section number (§) is given. 8. For a discussion of how the “I-thou” relationship (as a source of normativity) operates in the work of Donald Davidson, see Dostal 2011; McDowell (2009: 134-51). For a comparative study of the “I-thou” and “I-we” forms of sociality in Davidson and Wittgenstein, see Williams, Meredith 2000 and 2010. 9. As Brandom (2009: 70) claims, “Hegel’s view is what you get if you take the attitudes of both recogniser and recognised, both those who are authoritative and those who are responsible, to be essential necessary conditions of the institution of genuine normative statuses, and require in addition that those attitudes be symmetric or reciprocal.” 10. Pippin (2005: 400) has made the point that Hegel’s position is “far more substantive, far less formal, than that attributed to him by Brandom.” 11. PG stands for Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes. The section number (§) is given. 12. For a similar reading of Hegel’s Concept, see Horstmann 1984. 13. Hegel’s dictum, “The true is the whole” (GW 9: §20), has been interpreted as suggesting that any particular truth is “untrue” when understood in the context of the whole. Thus, Hegel’s speculative science aims for systematic completion. Brady Bowman (2013), combining respective analyses by Dieter Henrich (1978) and Rolf Horstmann (1984), argues that it is the dynamic nature of absolute negativity and the structural character of the Concept, which are one and the same, that make up Hegel’s conception of systematic unity and totality. 14. See Brandom (2009: 70). 15. Mutual recognition plays a vital role in accounting for sociality in the work of Davidson and Wittgenstein. See the references in footnote 9. 16. See, for example, Pippin (2008: 183-209). 17. For a detailed account of ethical life theory as an account of successful recognition, see Pippin 2008. 18. See, for example, Pippin 2005 and Pinkard 2007. Pippin (2005: 392) claims that Brandom “does not yet explain how either an external interpreter or internal participant can properly challenge

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the authority of the norms on the basis of which the attributions and assessments are made, or how those norms can fail to meet those challenges.” Pinkard accuses Brandom of aligning himself more with Fichte’s position than that of Hegel. According to Pinkard, Fichte suggests that “what I ought to do is constrained by what the other actually, factually does” (Pinkard 2007: 166). Similarly, Brandom “reduces normativity to ‘positive’ socially enforced rules rather than holding fast, as Hegel does, the irreducible normativity (or what Hegel calls ‘absolute negativity’) of our practices” (ibid.). 19. A similar point is made by Axel Honneth (2009a: 323). 20. See, for example, Pippin (2008: 207). 21. Brandom acknowledges that “Habermas is right to detect sympathy for an assimilation of normativity in general to specifically conceptual normativity (as I think Kant and Hegel do)” (Brandom, 2000b: 371). 22. For Hegel, the state of freedom constituted by reciprocal recognitive relationships is considered to be rational. 23. Honneth has also appropriated the distinction between justifiable and illegitimate norms on the basis of distortions of recognitive relationships in concrete social practices. Referring to the model of reciprocal recognition as both an “ideal” and a “rational universal” (Honneth 2009b: 25), he argues that deviations from the ideal are indicative of “forms of recognition that must be regarded as being false or unjustified because they do not have the function of promoting personal autonomy, but rather of engendering attitudes that conform to practices of domination” (Honneth, 2009a: 324-5). 24. See Pippin (2005: 393-4). 25. This question is still up for debate. See Pippin 2005; Pinkard 2007; and Fossen 2011. 26. In Making It Explicit, Brandom offers an account of the objectivity of conceptual norms as transcending contingent discursive situations. He famously asserts that “what is shared by all discursive perspectives is that there is a difference between what is objectively correct in the way of concept application and what is merely taken to be so” (Brandom, 1994: 600). On the basis of the objectivity of conceptual norms, it could be that a whole community is objectively wrong in the application of a concept. This means that such objectively incorrect agreements are, in principle, open to criticism and future revision. The point raised against Fossen’s claim regarding the “agonal” dimension of Brandom’s framework can also be applied to Brandom’s account of the “wrong community.” Specifically, without a way of grounding the distinction between illegitimate and legitimate conceptual norms, such a concession is explanatorily empty. One way to explain the distinction, as we have seen, is to make a distinction between genuine claims to normative authority and those claims that arise from coercive or manipulative discursive environments, and to ground that distinction in a theory of freedom according to which coercive discursive practices do not allow for genuine normative self-determination to the degree that discursive practitioners are unable to engage genuinely in the normative game of giving as asking for reasons. This is why Hegel, unlike Brandom, is so preoccupied with an account of social practice as a “struggle for recognition.” Ultimately, the struggle can only be resolved by reciprocal recognitive relationships constitutive of an achieved collective state of freedom in ethical life. 27. In certain places, Brandom seems to subscribe to “metalevel about the moral,” suggesting that there is nothing in particular that usually denominated “moral” reasons have in common that would justify grouping them together as moral reasons (Brandom, 2000b: 372). 28. This claim presupposes that we accept that Brandom is committed to a form of social positivism. 29. I am aware that I am not using the terms de re and de dicto in the ways interpreters of Brandom have suggested. After all, it is this demand for a distinction between what Brandom calls “subjective” and “objective” ascriptions that Cristina Lafont (2008) calls into question with

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the help of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s (GW 1; GW 2). The reason for the comparison is to illustrate that whilst, for Brandom, pragmatic explanation of language and intentionality places greater importance on de re ascriptions in order to account for the representational dimension of propositional content, the special character of “ethical life” validity leaves space for the salvaging of situational, evaluative “subjectivity” in relation to social norms that is precisely not identical and not reconcilable with them. 30. See Wellmer (1986: 134).

ABSTRACTS

In order to develop his pragmatist and inferentialist framework, Robert Brandom appropriates, reconstructs and revises key themes in German Idealism such as the self-legislation of norms, the social institution of concepts and facts, a norm-oriented account of being and the critique of representationalist accounts of meaning and truth. However, these themes have an essential ethical dimension, one that Brandom has not explicitly acknowledged. For Hegel, the determination of norms and facts and the institution of normative statuses take place in the context of Sittlichkeit (“ethical life”). By engaging with some of the more ontologically and ethically substantive points raised by Hegel, I argue that, from a Hegelian perspective, Brandom’s project regarding the social determination of truth and meaning cannot be divorced from ethics, specifically, the ethical dimension of social recognition. Furthermore, I argue that, in real situations (as opposed to ideal ones), claims to normative authority cannot be considered independently from the legitimacy of those claims, a legitimacy that Brandom is unable to reasonably explain. Finally, I argue that a Hegelian solution to the problems facing Brandom’s framework calls into question the unity of reason that is at the core of Brandom’s normative pragmatics and inferential semantics.

AUTHOR

JONATHAN LEWIS

Dublin City University Jonathan.lewis[at]dcu.ie

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Essays

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Peirce on Musement The Limits of Purpose and the Importance of Noticing

Elizabeth F. Cooke

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I am grateful to Jerold J. Abrams and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on an earlier draft. Any mistakes that remain are my own. “A pretty wild play of the imagination is, it cannot be doubted, an inevitable, and probably even a useful, prelude to science proper.” Peirce, “On Science and Natural Classes” (EP1: 131)

1. Introduction

1 From the beginning of his writings, Peirce establishes pragmatism in opposition to Descartes’s subjectivistic philosophy. Whereas Descartes grounds his philosophy in infallible intuition, Peirce grounds thought in an unlimited community of signs and fallible inquiry, which aims at truth and knowledge in the final opinion in the long run. This community of inquiry develops teleologically, in Aristotle’s sense, toward this one goal of knowledge, and this goal seems to draw all rational inquiry toward completion. If individuals come together with a commitment to truth and an openness to error, then the community can and will achieve truth in the long run. Peirce grounds this view in the assumption that our minds are evolutionarily attuned to nature and this attunement, if unfettered, draws our guesses toward knowledge of nature. Peirce calls these guesses “abductions.” Abduction is a distinct form of inference and operates at every level of experience from everyday perception to the most ingenious and it generates all new ideas.

2 But as Douglas Anderson demonstrates in Strands of System: The Philosophy of Charles Peirce, Peirce holds that abductive inferences, which aim at the final opinion, depend on

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a more subjective, and far less organized, thought process called “musement” (Anderson, 1995: 146-7). Peirce develops this theory of musement especially in his late essay, “The Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” (1908, hereafter NA), where he defines musement as “pure play,” and recommends this form of thinking not for the sake of truth, or problem-solving, or any purpose at all, but merely for recreation. In the NA Peirce establishes musement as the enjoyable, purposeless, meditative, free, creative, and contemplative mode of mind. Peirce also recommends practicing musement at a peaceful time of day, morning or evening, which encourages the mind naturally to generate those ideas found within its depths, and corresponding to nature, and among these is the idea of God.

3 But the theory and practice of musement is by no means limited to Peirce’s philosophical theology, as Anderson also writes, but lays at the center of his philosophy. In fact, Peirce emphasizes the need for free creative imaginative play in philosophy and science throughout his writings. For example, in the epigraph above, from “On Science and Natural Classes,” Peirce writes: “A pretty wild play of the imagination is, it cannot be doubted, an inevitable, and probably even a useful, prelude to science proper.” Indeed, while Peirce developed his theory of free play at length only in his very late work, his first entry into philosophy was this very theory of aesthetic play, which he found in Friedrich Schiller’s Æsthetical Education of Man (1794) with the concept of “Spieltrieb” (play drive).1

4 Peirce holds onto this notion of play and develops it in relation to his theory of inquiry, but renames Schiller’s “Spieltrieb” “musement,” after the Greek “Muse,” thereby capturing pure play’s poetic dimension of inspiration.2 In Greek mythology the Muses are goddesses who control inspiration, genius, and in all the arts and sciences. Peirce describes the practice of musement in much the same way great poets like Homer, Virgil, and Dante describe their engagements with the Muse as passive, powerful, and inspired. But, in some contrast to these poets who claim to hear and record the divine song of the Muse, Peirce finds musement to be the first stage not just of rare poetry but of the evolution of many new ideas in science. Musement as the somewhat passive but free play of mind contains absolutely no purpose, yet undergirds all purposeful advancement in the community of inquiry, since musement supplies inquiry with its novel insights. So the pragmatist theory of inquiry, defined primarily by its teleological end, appears to be grounded in a most unteleological thought process.

5 The question for this paper is whether we can rationally control musement even though it has no purpose other than recreation. In the first part of the paper, I argue that in musement, precisely because she eliminates all purpose from the mind, the muser is able to notice new signs, anomalies, problems, and questions, which allows her to generate novel hypotheses by speculating about these newly noticed things. Musement is about opening oneself up to new problems and anomalies, as well as opening oneself up to new explanatory hypotheses.

6 Here three stages of musement, implied in Peirce’s discussion, should be distinguished: (1) The pure play of ideas in which the individual is passive to ideas entering her mind, and thus open to noticing new things, which is akin to Peirce’s phenomenological category of Firstness, the spontaneity of feeling; (2) noticing strange phenomena, which is akin to Peirce’s category of Secondness, or reaction; and

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(3) the creative formation of an hypothesis that explains a strange phenomenon, and which then can be used in abduction, which is akin to Peirce’s category of generality or Thirdness.

7 While many commentators focus on the third stage of musement, I will focus on the first and second stages. In the second part of the paper, I argue that while we cannot directly control the reception of new ideas, we can indirectly control the purposeless and free play of musement insofar as we control when, how, and how deeply we engage in this practice; and further we consciously choose our ideals prior to musement, which end up bearing on which novel phenomena we notice in musement. This discussion of the evaluative and thus rational aspect of noticing itself is largely absent in the literature on Peircean musement and can help explain why some people notice problems, wonders, and anomalies, while others do not.

2. “Evolutionary Love”: Musement’s Role in Peirce’s Cosmology

8 The Muses are thought to inspire great poetry, and they come when they will, not when poets will that they come. Indeed, if the poet seeks to control the Muses, inevitably he fails. As Peirce writes in “Evolutionary Love” (1893), in the Monist series (1891-1893), It is as easy by taking thought to add a cubit to one’s stature, as it is to produce an idea acceptable to any of the Muses by merely straining for it, before it is ready to come. We haunt in vain the sacred well and throne of Mnemosyne; the deeper workings of the spirit take place in their own slow way, without our connivance. (EP1:361)

9 Here again, as in “On Science and Natural Classes,” Peirce develops his Schillerian theory of play that will become “musement” in the NA. In fact, here in “Evolutionary Love,” Peirce identifies the same state of free and open and relaxed contemplation as the ground of new ideas, with the Muses and their mother Mnemosyne Greek goddess of memory. But here too Peirce writes, as so many others have written of genius and inspiration, like Homer, Plato, Virgil, Dante, and Popper, that creativity is not within our control.

10 And yet, in this same discussion in “Evolutionary Love,” Peirce also suggests that the activity of play might partly fall under our control. While we may not be able to “strive” for an “idea acceptable to the Muses,” we can initiate play by striving to break up old habits of thought, in the imagination; and we can alter our surroundings so that the mind is open to new surprises which brightens ideas (CP6.301/EP1:361). Most of the time, the mind works almost mechanically, sinking into the condition of a railway junction, but here in play there appears a “spiritual peninsula, or cul-de-sac” (EP1:361).3 In this way, by breaking up habits and engaging in play, the mind exercises some preliminary control over the reception of new ideas. Because this activity is consciously directed, Peirce – in his otherwise Darwinian – identifies the play of thought with Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s teleological theory of evolution in Philosophie Zoologique (1809): “Thus, the first step in the Lamarckian evolution of mind is putting of sundry thoughts into situations in which they are free to play” (EP1:361).

11 It should be noted, however, that one of Peirce’s points in “Evolutionary Love” is that the individual is not as important as the community in coming up with new ideas. So here Peirce ultimately argues for what he calls an agapastic view of the evolution of

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thought, which emphasizes the individual, and emphasizes the importance of the evolving collective thought of society and the age, generating creative ideas (EP1:369; see also 370-1). While a more social or intersubjective mode of musement also appears to operate in Peirce’s philosophy, appearing prominently here in “Evolutionary Love,” this mode of musement must be set aside for purposes of the present discussion. By contrast, a much more individualistic account of musement appears in the NA, and this account will help us to address the question of rationally self-controlled play.

12 Still, individual creativity operates within this evolutionary account of mind, developed in “Evolutionary Love.” The deeper workings of the spirit operate in the community and evolve through history in their own slow way. But these deeper workings ultimately house themselves in the individual minds who produce all the creative works of the arts and sciences. Valuably filling in this picture of agapastic creativity, Anderson in Creativity and the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce advances what he finds to be Peirce’s implicit view of artistic creativity and the kind of rational self-control operative within this thought process. According to Anderson, Peirce’s cosmological principle of agape is the principle of control in God’s ongoing creation of the evolving cosmos, and that it serves as an analogy for Peirce’s view of human creativity (Anderson, 1987: 109). Anderson argues that, for Peirce, an artist controls the creative process by virtue of love for his art which he allows to grow under his care, like a garden. Anderson (ibid.) quotes Peirce saying, “The agapastic development of thought is the adoption of certain mental tendencies, not altogether heedlessly, as in tychasm, not quite blindly by the mere force of logic, as in anacasm, but by an immediate attraction for the idea itself, whose nature is divined before the mind possesses it, by the power of sympathy, that is, by virtue of the continuity of mind […]” (CP6.307). Agape allows an attractive idea to evolve and grow on its own terms (Anderson, 1987: 110). These are the cosmological principles which can make sense of both God’s and humanity’s creative rational control. As Anderson writes, “Agape thus mediates for creativity between purely tychistic and anancistic processes which Peirce saw as the traditional alternatives. An artist loves his idea and develops it by letting it suggest its own perfection” (ibid.: 134).

13 The present view fits within Peirce’s cosmology, as Anderson describes it, but shifts focus from the cosmology in “Evolutionary Love,” which Anderson ascribes to Peirce’s more phenomenological account. Peirce sets his phenomenology and categories at the ground of his philosophy, and these appear in every dimension of his thought, drawing these categories with one eye on Aristotle and the other on Kant. As Aristotle laid his own ten categories of being at the center of his philosophy, and Kant established his four categories of the understanding as shaping all possible experience, Peirce establishes his own three categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, as operative throughout the entire universe, which (contra Kant) is knowable in itself. And in contrast to Aristotle in Physics II.8, and following Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), Peirce found the mind to have been shaped by millions of years of evolution, so that Peirce’s (more Aristotelian) categories of nature reappear within the mind. But once these Aristotelian categories of nature reappear in new form by evolution within the human mind, they take on a more Kantian dimension. The spontaneity of nature also reappears within the mind, and this now Kantian spontaneity of mind shapes perception and experience according to the categories of the mind, categories which exhaust all possible experience. The spontaneity (fortuitous variation) manifests itself most prominently within the mind as the free creative play of musement. In examining

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musement, then, we cannot entirely separate mind from nature, for the play of musement is an extension of play in nature, in much the same way Anderson argues human artistic creativity is an extension of spontaneity in nature.

14 Yet, in musement, these categories may be interpreted in two ways, which stem from the two main historical and philosophical sources of the categories, namely, Aristotle and Kant. If we take a more Aristotelian approach to Peirce’s theory of musement, then musement appears to be the cultivation of natural spontaneity and teleological movements, and this more Aristotelian approach appears in Anderson’s more cosmological discussion of musement. For example, as Anderson writes, the mind tends its phenomena like a gardener tending a garden, where spontaneity, variation, complexity, beauty, and teleology all intertwine, and the function of the gardener, or inquirer, or muser, appears to be one of an artistically skilled and creative hand who respects the creativity of nature already operating within her mind, as in nature. Ideas unfold and bloom by equal parts good cultivation and wise moderation.

15 On the more Kantian view, which I am advancing, the gardener similarly tends her garden with many of the same techniques, the same categories, the same phenomenological and pragmatist eyes as the Aristotelian gardener. But the Kantian pragmatist gardener freely imposes more of herself into nature, with her own ideals. What she sees in the garden of her musing mind is partly given by nature, but largely shaped by the imposition of her own creative mind. Peirce began his philosophical career as a Kantian transcendental philosopher, but then, partly in response to Darwin, Peirce moved to a more Aristotelian metaphysics of potency and act, and an evolutionary objective idealism. Still, these two major systems of philosophy continued to mix in complex ways throughout Peirce’s writings, and while some may find him to unfold more of what is often taken to be a “pragmatist” philosophy, rather than a Kantian philosophy, Peirce’s theory of musement, advanced in his later years, arises out of his very early studies in Schiller’s of play, in relation to Kant’s theory of the imagination. And musement still bears the marks of a very Kantian mindset, even while incorporating a quite Aristotelian view of aesthetic contemplation, as found in the Nicomachean Ethics X.

16 Next we examine Peirce’s account of rational self-control, and then examine whether musement may fit this description.

3. Self-Control in “What Makes a Reasoning Sound”

17 In “What Makes a Reasoning Sound” (1903) Peirce defines self-control as conduct regulated by one’s ideals. An individual has a certain ideal based on the aesthetic quality it has for the individual, a consistency with other ideals, and the aesthetic quality of the consequences she imagines of fully carrying out her ideal (EP2:245-6). Upon reflecting on his ideal, the inquirer seeks to make his conduct conform to this aesthetic ideal. So, he formulates rules of conduct, which have an effect upon his disposition so that he modifies what he is inclined to do (EP2:246-8). He forms resolutions about how he will act under certain anticipated occasions, and, according to Peirce, “This resolution is of the nature of a plan, or, as one might almost say, a diagram ” (EP2:246). If the anticipated occasion actually arises, and the individual acts, then afterward, the individual examines (approvingly or disapprovingly) how his actions compare with his ideal, and these judgments will then affect his future actions

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(EP2:247-8). A man will review his conduct and his ideals repeatedly throughout the course of a life (EP2:248).4 It is worth noting here that one may very well need creativity in conceiving of an ideal in the first place, just as one would most certainly need imagination in considering the anticipated occasions one would compare with one’s ideal. This suggests that creativity may be prior to self-control, and therefore not subject to it. I will have more on this point in the final section.

4. Musement as the Purposeless Free Play of Ideas

18 In the NA Peirce defines musement as follows: There is a certain agreeable occupation of mind which, from its having no distinct name, I infer is not as commonly practiced as it deserves to be; for, indulged in moderately, – say through some five to six percent of one’s waking time, perhaps during a stroll, – is refreshing enough more than to repay the expenditure. Because it involves no purpose save that of casting aside all serious purpose, I have sometimes been half-inclined to call it rêverie, with some qualification; but for a frame of mind so antipodal to vacancy and dreaminess, such a designation would be too excruciating a misfit. In fact, it is Pure Play. Now, Play, we all know, is a lively exercise of one’s powers. Pure Play has no rules, except this very law of liberty. It bloweth where it listeth. It has no purpose, unless recreation. (EP2:436)

19 “Pure play” is a practice which aims at nothing outside itself and is done for its own enjoyment, for recreation alone. And it is not practiced frequently enough. Unlike the play of a game, there are no purposes or rules in pure play, or musement, except the one law of liberty. Peirce confesses to a temptation to call play “rêverie,” but retracts that name because it suggests vacancy. Like Schiller’s Spieltrieb, Peirce’s musement is intellectual free play without form or hindrance, performed for the sake of pleasure. After defining musement as free play, Peirce then quotes John 3:8 in the Bible: “It bloweth where it listeth.”5 This quotation, in Peirce at least, suggests a passive dimension to musement as well as a religious dimension, consistent with the purpose of the essay, “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,” in which Peirce argues that musement “will in time flower into the N.A.” (EP2:436). The more passive, though not vacant, perspective of musement would seem more consistent with Anderson’s, what I am calling, more Aristotelian view, where musement does what it does, and the gardener functions to allow musement as a fertile intellectual garden to “flower into the N.A.”

20 Because musement must be free, there is, for Peirce, no single way to engage in this practice. Musement “may take either the form of esthetic contemplation, or that of distant castle-building (whether in Spain or within one’s moral training), or that of considering some wonder in one of the Universes [of signs] or some connection between two of the three, with speculation concerning its cause” (EP2:436). It is this last kind of play which Peirce calls specifically the “play of musement,” in which the mind is naturally led to the hypothesis of God for its natural aesthetic attractiveness. In musement one follows questions and ideas wherever they may lead, suggesting a thought process cultivated with an openness to wonder and anomalies. Yet Peirce thinks most people tend to begin musement with psychological questions, which often lead to musings on variety among the universes, and then continuity among them, finding in these universes of signs the phenomenon of evolution or growth, the growth of signs themselves. And then, reflecting on growth of signs in the three universes,

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whether or not the muser be consciously contemplating the concepts Peirce articulates, Peirce claims that anyone may arrive at the hypothesis of the reality of God, and will be stirred to the depths of her nature by the beauty of that idea, and by its practicality, to shape one’s conduct into conformity with it, i.e. to believe it (EP2:440). Peirce’s third- person account of musement in the NA can still appear deterministic, since Peirce describes musement as almost destined to end in a hypothesis about God. But Peirce also insists that musement is a practice in which one can decide to engage, suggesting that it is within our control (EP2:436).

21 While it is important to articulate the context of the NA in which the theory of musement appears, it is no less important to bear in mind the centrality of that theory to the whole of Peirce’s philosophy. In fact, even in the religious context of the discussion in the NA, Peirce claims that play may function as part of the first stage of inquiry of which abduction is an essential part (EP2:440-1). And again, as Peirce writes in “On Science and Natural Classes,” science depends on “a pretty wild play of the imagination.” In fact, even in “The Fixation of Belief” (1877) musement operates as a condition of inquiry. As Anderson writes in Strands of System, while Peirce often uses Romantic and poetic imagery to describe it, ultimately musement plays a fundamental role in the basic structure of inquiry. In less romantic terms, this underdetermination in musement can also be seen as a condition of the of ‘The Fixation of Belief’; it is the only method that does not begin inquiry with its goal already presupposed. Musement is an activity in which we may choose, in a self-controlled fashion, to engage, but it leaves room for tychistic development, for ideas ‘to grow up spontaneously out of Pure Play without any breach of continuity.’ (Anderson, 1995: 146)6

22 Science and its various stages of inquiry all have their goal presupposed, but all rest on musement, which does not have its goal presupposed. We can control musement, according to Anderson, at the beginning with the choice to enter the state, but this control is not very great, for in musement ideas must be free to rise up in the mind spontaneously (tychistically).7 Anderson takes up the question of control in musement again in relation to abduction, and again describes the activity of musement as play that begins with control but does not proceed with control. As Anderson (1995: 157) writes, […] while retroduction is self-controlled, this first moment of critical reasoning is not fully controlled. There is a spontaneous dimension; the reasoner controls to the point of permitting the play of ideas but then must respond to retroductive suggestions as they present themselves.

23 Here Anderson establishes the precise interval of control in Peirce’s theory of inquiry between musement and abduction. The inquirer, by an act of conscious self-control leaves controlled inquiry and enters the open and playful state of musement, and then emerges from the free play of ideas with an insight utilized in controlled inquiry.

24 Of course, Peirce holds that scientific inquiry is a rational, self-controlled, and purposeful activity, which aims at truth in the long run. So, it appears that the purposeful activity of inquiry ultimately arises from the purposeless but creative activity of play. That relationship and apparent tension raises the question whether play can be controlled at all, beyond “permitting the play of ideas,” especially if it has no purpose.

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5. Thinking without Purpose Enables One to Notice Novelty

25 But while this lack of purpose gives musement its freedom, it is not clear how we are to make sense of a thought process which has no purpose, especially considering that, for Peirce, all thought is in signs, and all signs are end-directed. As T. L. Short argues that semiosis is always teleological, for Peirce (Short, 2004: 230). In conscious thought, a sign prompts a trajectory of thought insofar as a sign represents an object (in a certain respect and for a certain purpose) to an interpretant, so all thought is purposeful insofar as it is interpretive.8 Of course, musement is thought in signs, and signs are teleological, and this teleology appears in the phenomena of growth in musement, and yet musement is purposeless. But musement must have at least some purpose in order to be meaningful at all, in order to be semiotic at all, and to bear the fruit that it does. Peirce must mean that musement does not have a set-out agenda or plan, as we might have when we set out to plan a vacation, prove a theory, grow flowers, or paint a painting.

26 Perhaps we can understand the purposelessness of musement in this way. In discussing associations of the mind, Peirce explains that when we say that some thought has occurred to us, that thought does not actually enter consciousness. Rather, for Peirce, the thought is already there in consciousness and only seems to enter into consciousness when the thought becomes semiotically connected with another idea in a voluntary act of reasoning, and so becomes subjectively vivid enough to “find a place in our narrative” (CP7.435). Now if a voluntary act of thought (i.e., a purposeful one) makes some ideas, which are already there in consciousness, more vivid, then trying to get rid of purpose, as we do in musement, might make many more of our ideas vivid at once, or make some ideas less vivid, thereby allowing other ideas to become more vivid. Whether novelty comes from new experience or from exploring what is already there in one’s mind, but which has not yet found “a place in our narrative,” musement’s purposelessness seems to offer the benefit of allowing potential ideas to become actual when they otherwise would not have, due to our previous purposes holding the reins.

27 Also central to understanding musement as purposeless is the question whether the wonder, which becomes the focus of musement, initiates musement, or results from musement. Admittedly Peirce in the NA says musement begins with “considering some wonder in one of the Universes or some connection between two of the three, with speculation concerning its cause” (EP2:436). But it is not clear whether Peirce means that one sets out to muse about a wonder (and its cause), or whether one considers a wonder, and then in the process of musement, begins to speculate about its cause, or, as a third possibility, whether one sets out to muse and then, through this process, notices the wonder and begins to speculate about its cause. There are significant differences here. For example, if one sets out to muse about a cause of a wonder, then musement already has the purpose of finding a cause. And even if one simply begins to muse about a wonder, musement would already have a focus, something already deemed to be a wonder or a curiosity worthy of speculation, and this too would give musement a purpose. But if one sets out to think for no particular purpose, and, in doing so, certain wonders, surprises, and anomalies naturally come up, then this activity better fits Peirce’s description of musement as performed for the sake of recreation, and without a particular purpose, but which may gain a purpose through this open thought process.

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Within this purposeless activity, the muser lays open her mind to noticing and identifying a wonder or a surprise worthy of subsequent speculation as to its cause and nature. This view makes the most sense of Peirce’s comments on musement.

28 Peirce claims that inquiry begins with surprises which we seek to explain and understand (EP2:440-1). Peirce also includes the noticing of a wondrous phenomenon in this first general stage of inquiry, which means that noticing strange phenomena is part of the creative hypothesis-generating part of science (EP2:441). In this way, musement as an openness to surprise and to noticing wonders can be seen to function as a condition for inquiry. And Peirce’s discussions on musement suggest that creativity is not only about problem solving whereby the creative work is done within the narrow parameters of the problem at hand, but that creativity is often about noticing, which allows one to find a good (important or interesting) problem upon which to speculate in the first place. This is an important dimension that is overlooked in many accounts of creativity.9

6. Entering Musement

29 In his early anti-Cartesian papers Peirce rejected the subjectivist and detached view of mind, which John Dewey in The Quest for Certainty (1929) would later call the “spectator theory of knowledge” (Dewey, 2008: 19). Perhaps nothing could be more antithetical to pragmatism than this view of the mind as a disengaged spectator, and yet something like this view appears to be what Peirce sets at the center of his philosophy with musement. In one of the most poetic passages of the NA, Peirce describes musement as deeply passive and spectatorial, and yet also dialogical. ‘Enter your skiff of Musement, push off into the lake of thought, and leave the breath of heaven to swell your sail. With your eyes open, awake to what is about or within you, and open conversation with yourself; for such is all meditation.’ It is, however, not a conversation in words alone, but is illustrated, like a lecture, with diagrams and with experiments. (EP2:437)

30 A skiff is a light and small boat, typically with a flat bottom. A skiff has no rudder and no motor, but can have a sail to be blown by the wind. We enter our skiff, according to Peirce, we take in our oars, and push off into the lake of thought. We give up control and allow musement (like the wind) to take us where it will. Peirce calls this activity a meditation and conversation with oneself, which suggests a rational thought process, with some level of control over the activity. Peirce also describes the muser’s conversation not only in words but illustrated with diagrams and experiments “like a lecture.” But it is not clear whether she is giving or receiving a lecture, and it is not clear whether she is constructing and interacting with her own diagram or receiving it.

31 In support of musement as dialogical, but somewhat passive, Michael Raposa in Peirce’s argues it is also a kind of listening. 10 Raposa claims that in musement the individual should be attentive and fully awake, listening with lively attention, to the back-and-forth of passive and active thinking, like the give-and-take of actual conversation (Raposa, 1989: 210). But in entering this thought process, one treats one’s previous beliefs and concepts in a detached way, “as though one did not have them,” which thereby allows one to treat the contents of the mind playfully (ibid.: 215). Kathleen Hull in “Why Hanker After Logic? Mathematical Imagination, Creativity and Perception in Peirce’s Systematic Philosophy,” emphasizes the visual over the

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verbal nature of musement, but similarly argues that in musement we must inhibit the self in order to perceive “the spontaneous conjectures of instinctive reason,” and then observe nature, or our diagrams, in a more self-controlled way, where we will see correctly and arrive at necessary perceptions (Hull, 1994: 289-90).

32 Raposa’s listening interpretation, and Hull’s visual interpretation, both appear in Peirce’s NA, and I follow both interpretations, as well as Anderson, in portraying musement as partly passive. But, as these commentators view musement as a process of generating, contemplating, and selecting hypotheses, we also extend this passive listening and attentiveness of musement to include the noticing of phenomena as strange and anomalous from the start. The process of musement includes a kind of openness to puzzles, surprises, and anomalies that are in need of explanation, in addition to generating and selecting hypotheses. On my view, musement not only opens us up to discovering solutions to problems (because it opens our minds to possibilities beyond our current beliefs), but also opens our minds to problems and constraints that were not previously noticed or appreciated, and thereby gives us new wonders about which to hypothesize.

33 In “On the Algebra of Logic” (1885) Peirce writes that thinking is prompted by irritation and stimulation (CP3.155), but surprise need not arise externally – one can also experience surprise internally from a fancy, from our own imagination, which can begin a train of thought (CP3.159).11 In musement one opens oneself up to experiencing, either from fancy or the world, new surprises that might otherwise go unnoticed and unfelt. So musement includes the initial process of opening oneself up to being surprised and to noticing strange, surprising, wonderful phenomena, and the speculation about explanations, and the generation of hypotheses.

7. The Importance of Noticing

34 The first moment of abduction is the appearance of a surprising or strange phenomenon. And we do not need to muse in order to notice a strange phenomenon and then creatively form an abduction. In fact, we creatively form abductions all day long. But we miss things and fail to make abductions all day long as well. Musement is ideal for noticing strange and surprising phenomena that might otherwise go unnoticed. It is important that we open ourselves up not only to strange things, but also to wondrous things, and wondrous things that are familiar but under-appreciated or previously unnoticed. In “The Universal Categories” (1903) Peirce implies a need for the kind of openness to new wonders we find here in musement when he argues that sometimes the truly wondrous things are the familiar things that typically go unnoticed in favor of the more obviously strange or different. […] [T]he Faradays and Newtons seem to themselves like children who have picked up a few pretty pebbles upon the ocean beach. But most of us seem to find it difficult to recognize the greatness and wonder of things familiar to us. As the prophet is not without honor save [in his own country] so it is also with phenomena. Point out to the ordinary man evidence, however conclusive, of other influence than physical action in things he sees every day, and he will say: ‘Well, I don’t see as that frog has got any points about him that’s any different from any other frog.’ For that reason we welcome instances perhaps of less real cogency but which have the merit of being rare and strange. (CP5.65)

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35 Most of us walk upon the beach and think nothing of a pebble or a frog. But the great like Faraday and Newton look at common and everyday things and see them as strange and marvelous. Their minds seem to live in a more childlike and playful state. Peirce thinks of musement as precisely this frame of mind for noticing the miraculous in the common. Noticing great and wonderful things can be difficult because often they are so familiar and because the mind becomes habituated to seeing them all the time. But in musement the mind is open to considering the most common and everyday features anew. And sometimes when we do this, even familiar things can all of a sudden be noticed anew and felt even as surprising and wondrous.

36 Now abduction depends not just on having the initial surprise but also on feeling its need for an explanation. As Peirce writes in “On the Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents, Especially from Testimonies” (1901), Abduction makes its start from the facts, without, at the outset, having any particular theory in view, though it is motived by the feeling that a theory is needed to explain the surprising facts. (EP2:106)

37 Abduction begins with a strange or surprising phenomenon. And musement is the process of opening oneself to such surprises and anomalies and to the feeling that a theory is needed to explain the surprising fact. (And, again, the mind in musement doesn’t just begin with an openness to questions, but is open throughout, following the ideas, anomalies, surprises and questions wherever they lead.) So creative thinking in musement is not just a kind of dialectic which answers questions, but one that finds and raises questions. And it seems we are aesthetically motivated in musement since we engage for the sake of recreation alone, for pleasure. So, if we are interested in fostering this kind of creativity that yields novel problems and questions, then it seems we have to foster a kind of enjoyment of open-ended and purposeless thinking.

38 Again, we cannot control receiving novel ideas by simply striving for them, as Peirce writes in “Evolutionary Love.” And the surprise which prompts inquiry itself cannot be controlled, since it does not make sense to say that one can set out to be surprised. But we can try to leave ourselves open to new and interesting surprises. And if we do this while attempting to neutralize our current beliefs and traditions, as Raposa (2012b: 52-3) writes, then we may come upon surprises which prompt new lines of inquiry and hence new ideas. Of course, we can have no guarantees that we will see strange and surprising phenomena, and yet, as Peirce writes of abduction, the mind is adapted to see and know the world. Only, the mind must detach itself from its everyday habits of looking at the world in order to see it better.

8. Is Musement Self-Controlled?

39 Now we must consider whether musement is more in line with rational self-control or whether it lies beyond our control, like perceptual judgments. For Peirce, in “What Makes Reasoning Sound,” reasoning “is essentially thought that is under self-control, just as moral conduct is conduct under self-control” (EP2:249; see also EP2:188 and 337). And this is why Peirce regards reason as a part of ethics. In the same way that we evaluate actions according to ideals, we also evaluate reasoning according to ideals, continually checking, evaluating, and approving our thoughts (like our actions) as rational (EP2:249-50). But thought must be checked and deliberately approved to be called rational (EP2:250). An operation of the mind is considered reasonable, if there is

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an ideal to which a person compares his thinking when it is done. If an activity of the mind is rational and self-controlled, then this means that it is also a conscious operation, as Peirce writes in “Issues of Pragmaticism” (1905, EP2:348) and “The Basis of Pragmaticism in the Normative Sciences” (1906, EP2:387). But there are limits to self- control in thought and in inquiry, as we do not exercise control over perceptual judgments or our already established beliefs (EP2:387; see also 169, 240-1, 337).

40 Raposa, Hull, and Roberta Kevelson in Peirce and the Mark of the Gryphon, all claim musement is a kind of reasoning, which would mean that it is self-controlled.12 Yet, this implication does not seem to be central to Peirce’s own discussion of musement. And further, there are at least two reasons why musement would appear not to be rationally self-controlled. First, as we have already discussed, musement does not have a purpose initially, except for the purpose of musing itself. It proceeds throughout in a very open- ended way, taking up problems and leaving them for new ones, following ideas wherever they lead. The second reason follows from the first, namely, that there is no possibility for error in musement, in contrast to inquiry, in general.13 In musement the free-playing mind cannot go wrong because it does not aim at anything in particular.

41 For these reasons, on our view, musement does not fit neatly into this model of rational self-control. But as we shall argue in the next section it does fit there loosely because, within musement, even while it is passive, we still evaluate and make judgments for good reasons.

9. Musement as Internally Rational Yet Without Purpose

42 While our focus has been on musement as an initial stage of creativity in science, art, and even everyday thinking, Anderson’s discussion on the rational control of artistic creativity remains a helpful guide. In Creativity Anderson claims that, for Peirce, “as an artist creates, his telos gets refined. It grows and becomes more and more distinct. Thus, in the same way that for Peirce the universe itself moves from the vague to the definite, an artist’s telos crystallizes in its unique particularity” (Anderson, 1987: 5-6). For Anderson, the artist does not have full rational control of his activity and the activity may not even be his, but the control the artist has is in developing a telos and letting it grow under his care (ibid.: 6).14 But artistic creativity can be seen as rational, despite the artist not knowing where he is going initially, because he tends to his work, engages it, and has agapastic concern for it.

43 Following Anderson, I also argue that, even in the initial stages of creative musement, the play of ideas which enables us to notice new things can also be seen to be rational, although it begins without purpose, but for the following distinct reason: musement seems to be evaluative through and through. And if it is evaluative, then musement must appeal to an ideal. And if it consciously appeals to an ideal, then musement can be said to fit loosely into Peirce’s model for rational self-control.

44 Creativity often includes noticing interesting and important phenomena to consider, which requires evaluation and appealing to ideals. But not only is there evaluation in selecting which feature of reality on which to focus one’s speculation, for even the very having of surprising experience or the very noticing of wondrous or anomalous phenomena can be thought of as evaluative insofar as a surprising experience is

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influenced by what we know and what we value. Some things strike one person as surprising, while another person who experiences the same thing is not struck by the experience (and therefore really has a different kind of experience), and does not judge it to be anomalous because she differs in her knowledge or values. We typically cannot help but form expectations, some of which will be disappointed, and thus cannot help but be surprised. But which experiences are surprising will differ for different people. If, for example, a person does not know that camels are mostly a desert animal, then she probably would not feel surprised to learn that camels can swim.15 But it is also the case that if a person knows, but does not care, about desert animals, or does not care about what animals can or cannot do, then she may not experience surprise upon seeing camels swim. While we all experience surprise pervasively throughout our everyday experience, for Peirce, we are surprised about different things (CP1.332). Our beliefs and our cares partly constitute our expectations about the way the world is. These beliefs, cares, and values are normative and descriptive, and they function to prime the pumps of perception for experiencing different kinds of surprises throughout one’s day-to-day experience. When one lacks care or belief, some potentially surprising signs are not recognized or felt as surprising, and thus cannot initiate further thought.

45 But do cares and values function like ideals in Peirce’s account of self-control? Ideals, for Peirce, are chosen, and have a regulative effect on the individual, whereas one may care or value something without having chosen these as her ideals. Nonetheless, often cares and values do indicate a chosen ideal. For example, because a mother cares, she might notice (and be surprised by the fact) that her daughter is missing her lunchbox on her way to school. The mother’s noticing indicates her cares and values, but this also indicates an ideal she holds, namely, that her daughter eats all her meals. The surprise reveals to her not just her previous beliefs, which are sometimes held unconsciously, but also her ideals and values, which are not unconscious, but which might not have been initially at the forefront of her consciousness at the moment when she notices the missing lunchbox. Still her ideals and values are there. Similarly, throughout the different stages of musement, we engage our previous beliefs, values, and ideals as we face new ideas and experiences, even though we did not set out to fulfill our ideals when we set out to muse.

46 But is this still reason if we did not set out to fulfill a goal? While musement may not begin with a plan or purpose, nonetheless reasons are internal to the thought process. Even at the initial stage, the muser has reasons for noticing something as anomalous and experiencing it as surprising insofar as she can rationally explain why she felt or took something to be surprising in relation to her previous expectations – even if she did not know what her previous expectations were. Experience in general is more passive than rational thought, but because surprise is based on our previous expectations and values, it may mean that sometimes we take some things (and not others) as surprising for good reason, although we did not muse with a plan to notice or be surprised in the way that we were. Of course, there is a difference between giving a rational explanation for why something was experienced as surprising (e.g. I noticed a sugar maple tree in the park, because I was thinking of planting one in my own yard), and giving a causal explanation for why something was surprising (e.g., I noticed that billboard because it was red and bright: it caught my eye). Here we mean a rational rather than a causal account for not just selecting some surprise as worth pursuing, but a rational account for even having the surprising experience itself. Reason is at work at

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all stages of musement, including in the very experiencing of surprising anomalies.16 And since Peirce’s muser acts for reasons, some ideals must be at work. And since Peirce’s muser does not set out to fulfill these ideals before musing, she must do so within this thought process in order to make these judgments. In musement one is open to these challenges and surprises without knowing exactly where the thought process will take her. When she sets out to muse, she sets out to reason in a way she did not plan. In addition to noticing, of course, there is the attraction to an idea that occurs in musement, as Anderson discusses, in the play of ideas in both art and science and, of course, in musement in the NA (Anderson, 1987: 110, 131). We allow ourselves to be attracted to an idea and this attraction to an idea is also a reflection of one’s previously chosen ideals and values in addition to agape. So one’s ideals influence the entire process of musement, even the initial stage of noticing.

10. No Error in Musement

47 We can understand musement as a creative thought process which does not proceed according to a pre-planned goal, and also understand musement as rational insofar as musement employs ideals and reasons internal to the activity of thinking itself. Yet there is another important sense in which musement does not fit the model of rational self-control precisely, namely, musement does not err. There is no sense in which one can go wrong in musement qua musement precisely because musement doesn’t have a goal – neither an explicit goal in the mind of the muser, nor a goal hidden to the muser. One can muse and come up with incorrect hypotheses, of course, but this is not an error of musement in its primary mode of free play and noticing.17 At least at the noticing stage of musement, when one notices something strange, we cannot say that it is wrong to notice it or to find it surprising.18 Of course, it may seem strange to say that musement is evaluative, and yet cannot error. But the kind of evaluative claims that the individual makes in musement, especially at this noticing stage, are not truth claims, but claims regarding what is interesting, puzzling, and worth thinking about some more.

48 Yet, while we cannot muse according to a purpose and we cannot make errors in musement, we nonetheless can and do evaluate our musings retrospectively. And, in this sense, musement fits at least part of the model of self-control whereby we compare our past actions with our ideals and standards. So, while there may not be a way to have erroneous thoughts in musement, there is, nonetheless, a sense in which one might muse well or muse poorly. Both the noticing of anomalies and the hypothesis formation in musement can be more or less valuable, more or less novel, more or less relevant, more or less interesting, or even healthy. One may also have better or worse reasons for noticing what one does and selecting what one selects to ponder, and we may only be able to judge these reasons as more or less helpful, after musement is done. These judgments are made in light of ideals not necessarily at the forefront of our consciousness during musement. But although we may make judgments about the goodness or fruitfulness of musement only after musement has concluded, and although it is not the job of musement to be helpful, relevant, interesting, or true, this does not mean that the ideals we use to make those judgments were not at work during musement. While there may not be a purpose in musement, there are always ideals at work influencing the process, allowing the person to make the judgments she makes in

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her musement. And perhaps sometimes the reason why someone has more helpful, interesting, and relevant ideas when she muses is due to her ideals. One cannot muse without beliefs, values, and ideals already in place, even if she can suspend her immediate purpose. And again, one’s values and beliefs influence what one notices, even if one attempts to neutralize one’s beliefs, in Raposa’s sense, so that she can muse relatively freely.

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SHORT T. L., (2007), Peirce’s Theory of Signs, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

NOTES

1. Schiller (1884: 120). 2. See Jeffrey Barnouw 1988. Barnouw argues the early influence of Schiller on Peirce extends throughout Peirce’s writings. In particular, Barnouw argues that the root of Peirce’s reasoning as self-control is a habit of feeling, which has been subjected to self-criticism, and this Peirce gets from Schiller. As Barnouw writes (ibid.: 609), “Aesthetics so conceived is a discipline governing the deliberate formation of habits of feeling which should inform our responses, our readiness to act in particular ways given particular circumstances. This is the main respect in which Friedrich Schiller’s conception of aesthetic education as cultivation of the capacity of feeling (Ausbildung des Empfindungsvermögens) should be seen as an influential model for Peirce.” 3. See also Roberta Kevelson (1999: 220). She discusses Peirce’s view on how we might indirectly control creativity and induce novelty (ms. 1105) “by deliberately distorting the means by which we habitually, consciously transform sensibility into thought” (Kevelson, 1999: 220).

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4. See Helmut Pape (2012: 159). Here Pape argues that self-control, for Peirce, does not entail controlling oneself at a particular moment, but is an ongoing process, which entails both prospective anticipation and retrospective reflections in comparing one’s actions with one’s ideals (CP8.320). 5. This same passage appears in George Santayana’s Realms of Being (2009: 152): “Spirit bloweth where it listeth, and continually undoes its own work.” 6. See also Anderson (1987: 42). 7. See also Royce Jones (1976: 357); and Sara Barrena (2013: 12). 8. According to Gabriele Gava in Peirce’s Account of Purposefulness: A Kantian Interpretation (2014), purposefulness is a necessary condition for semiosis. Gava argues that the metaphysics of cosmology and growth depend upon Peirce’s account of the necessity of purpose in thinking and sign processes (and not the other way around, like other scholars argue) (ibid.: 2). 9. For example, in “Artificial Intelligence: A Contradiction in Terms?” discusses several kinds of creativity, one of which she calls transformational creativity because the novel structure does not fit into previously known styles. In these cases “the originator alters (or drops) some previously recognized constraint or adds one or more new ones.” But Boden does not discuss the thought process whereby someone notices there was a constraint there to begin with (2014: 228-9). 10. Michael Raposa in “Musement as Listening: Daoist Perspectives on Peirce,” emphasizes listening over looking since it is more passive (2012a: 214). See also Anderson (1995: 148) who also discusses the phenomenological and perceptive part of musement as well as the internal dialogue and diagrammatic part of musement. 11. See Kevelson’s discussion of this passage in her discussion on musement and creativity (1999: 221). 12. See Raposa (1989: 125). See also Hull (2005: 493), and Kevelson (1999: 219). 13. Short in Peirce’s Theory of Signs (2007: 154) argues that wherever there is purpose, there can be success or failure, better or worse, and thus, self-correction, but without purpose, there can be no mistakes. Similarly, James Liszka in “Charles Peirce on Ethics,” (2012: 56) also argues that purposive action and rational self-control go together, and that without the possibility of error and self-correction, it is difficult to see how there can be self-control. 14. Anderson sees his interpretation as evidence that Peirce held the claim we find in contemporary aesthetics that an artist does not know fully what he is going to create until he creates it (ibid.: 5-6). See also Collingwood who argues in The Principles of Art (1958) that true creative art (as opposed to craft) cannot have a preplanned goal in mind beforehand – otherwise it is not true creativity (ibid.: 129). See also Maitland (1976: 397); Kieran (2014: 127, 129); and Harrison (1971: 111-2, 115, 118). 15. I am grateful to R. Abrams for this example. 16. Hull argues that in one sense both musement and mathematical reasoning are not self- controlled because they are semiotic or interpretive activities, not rule-following activities. But Musement, like mathematics, is an observational activity. But Hull (1994: 286) thinks it is still rationally self-controlled, because she reads Peircean self-control as being inhibitory in the sense of controlling the self so that we may perceive genuine Thirdness (in the mathematical diagram). 17. It may be argued that, at later stages of musement, which might take on a purpose of explaining some anomaly, musement can be said to go wrong, because it can go right, as Peirce claims musement can provide the “smoothly fitting keys” to problem (EP2:437). 18. Of course, surprise itself is the discovery of an error in a previous belief or expectation. But the discovery of an error is not itself an error but rather an achievement. See Cooke 2011.

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ABSTRACTS

An apparent tension persists in Peirce’s philosophy between the purpose-driven nature of inquiry, destined to achieve truth in the long run, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fact that inquiry depends upon musement (or the free play of ideas), which is purposeless. If there is no purpose in musement then it would appear there is no rational self-control in musement, and thus, irrationality lies at the center of Peirce’s theory of inquiry. I argue that in musement the individual sets off without a purpose, thereby opening herself to noticing novelty, and that noticing is itself a form of creative thought insofar as it allows the individual to discover new wonders and anomalies. Not all creativity in inquiry aims at solving problems or formulating new hypotheses. Some creative thinking is about noticing what is already there or possibly there. Such noticing in musement is purposeless, and yet the individual retains some rational self- control within this thought process. She controls the entry into the activity, and, prior to musing, she controls the adoption of the ideals which are inevitably employed in musement. This adoption of some ideals rather than others can explain why some people notice things while others do not.

AUTHOR

ELIZABETH F. COOKE

Creighton University efc09574[at]creighton.edu

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Multilingual

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Rosa M. CALCATERRA, Filosofia della contingenza. Le sfide di Richard Rorty Genova, Marietti, 2016, 212 pages

Francisco Javier Ruiz Moscardó

REFERENCIA

Rosa M. CALCATERRA, Filosofia della contingenza. Le sfide di Richard Rorty, Genova, Marietti, 2016, 212 pages “There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions.” Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism

I. Introducción: ¿es Richard Rorty el hombre que mató a la verdad?

1 En el año 2003, apenas cuatro años antes de la muerte de Richard Rorty, la cadena BBC emitió un breve documental sobre su figura de título revelador: The Man who Killed the Truth. Ciertamente, cualquier conocedor de la obra del filósofo pragmatista coincidirá en que hay al menos un concepto de “verdad” con el que el autor de Consequences of Pragmatism ajustó cuentas en la mayoría de sus escritos, a saber: la verdad como correspondencia (y su inevitable correlato, la noción del conocimiento como representación). En este sentido, si hubiera que elegir un eslogan para centrar el objetivo general del profesor de Stanford, este podría ser el de diluir la verdad en la justificación. Desde estas

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coordenadas, y por inspirarnos en el vocabulario propuesto por las autoridades del pragmatismo clásico, tendríamos conocimiento – si este ha de consistir en la acumulación de creencias verdaderas (adecuadamente) justificadas – cuando sendos “hábitos de acción” beneficiosos para la satisfacción de ciertos fines fuesen capaces de producir el suficiente consenso en un determinado contexto. Así, el criterio de justificación deweyano de la “warranted assertibility” ocuparía el núcleo de un conocimiento ahora alejado de toda normatividad que no emane del ámbito discursivo; y la verdad resultaría, como corolario, relativa a los preceptos y asunciones del auditorio concreto que tome parte en una conversación digna de tal nombre.

2 Rorty abría así de par en par, a ojos de sus críticos más feroces, las puertas de la posmodernidad y el relativismo, del todo vale y del constructivismo antirrealista más desenfocado, cuando no del provincialismo etnocéntrico más peligroso. Asesinando a la verdad, Rorty cometía a su vez el más imperdonable de los crímenes, aquel que acumulaba tantos agravantes que justificaba su destierro del selecto club de filósofos acreditados: renegar de la preciada capacidad normativa de la praxis filosófica para arrebatarle, como consecuencia, el lugar privilegiado que ésta había ocupado desde la Modernidad, y así degradarla sin honores a mero “género literario.” El hombre que mató la verdad se convertiría entonces en el hombre que remató a la filosofía.

3 Pues bien: Rosa M. Calcaterra se propone, como motivo transversal de la obra que aquí nos ocupa, conjurar esta simplificación tan manida por los críticos de nuestro filósofo, cuestionando la mayoría de tópicos que circulan sobre el mejor apologista del (neo)pragmatismo; y esto sin caer en una hagiografía entusiasta que orille los (no pocos) excesos del filósofo neoyorkino. En lo que sigue, pues, expondremos la réplica de Calcaterra a la vulgata rortiana, como modo de presentar la interpretación – y, por qué no decirlo, la reivindicación – de un pensador que ha conseguido ya, pese a quien pese, introducirse en el canon académico como el filósofo más importante del último tercio del siglo XX. Pero antes, conviene realizar unas observaciones preliminares con objeto de centrar el planteamiento.

II. Sistematizando al filósofo edificante: interrogantes preliminares

4 Como es bien sabido, en las últimas secciones de la obra de 1979 que lanzó a Rorty al estrellato – Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature – nuestro autor especifica la tradición filosófica que se propone combatir con el rótulo de systematic philosophy, culmen de aquella philosophy-as-discovery que había tematizado diez años atrás en The Linguistic Turn. Como alternativa, la impugnación rortiana pretendía apoyarse en una concepción edificante de nuestra disciplina, capaz de conjugar las mejores innovaciones de tres gigantes que preconfiguraron el ansiado cambio de perspectiva: Heidegger, Wittgenstein y Dewey. Esta óptica crítica debía desvelar las incongruencias del proceder sistemático, a la vez que mostrar tanto la contingencia radical de cualquier vocabulario institucionalizado como la primacía de la pars destruens en un filosofar capaz de rehuir las falsas promesas de la filosofía especular.

5 Así las cosas, Calcaterra trata de reconstruir los pilares maestros de la propuesta rortiana asumiendo desde el inicio la siguiente paradoja: ¿cómo esbozar un retrato general, con visos de sistematicidad, de un filósofo que reniega de la capacidad

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constructiva y doctrinal de la filosofía? ¿Acaso tal planteamiento no nos abocaría a considerar a Rorty como un pensador mucho más “tradicional” de lo que él mismo estaría dispuesto a admitir? ¿Habrá conseguido el neopragmatismo instaurarse como el último y decisivo eslabón de una cadena que ha logrado clausurar el paradigma sistemático o, por el contrario, Rorty es simplemente un militante destacado de una tradición – llámese hermenéutica, pragmatismo o filosofía terapéutica – todavía rehén de un marco epistémico difícil de derribar? En último término, una exposición así ha de afrontar el conjunto típico de contradicciones y aporías que han asaltado a filósofos con similares proyectos; pues, en definitiva, ¿puede haber crítica sin tesis? ¿El relato sobre el final de los metarrelatos no deviene, a la postre, él mismo en un metarrelato de características parejas? ¿No pretende la redescripción rortiana de la historia de la filosofía ser más verdadera que los discursos contra los que pugna?

6 Todos estos interrogantes sustancian sutilmente la obra que aquí reseñamos. Pero de momento adelantemos simplemente que el panorama contemporáneo de estudios sobre Rorty dibuja un paisaje ambivalente: por un lado, es indudable que el interés por el neopragmatismo no ha dejado de crecer, y poco a poco van imponiéndose lecturas que rehuyen la frecuente interpretación de nuestro autor como un charlatán posmoderno defensor del relativismo más inconsistente; sin embargo, este aumento de bibliografía revela a su vez la magnitud de un cierto fracaso, pues sin duda las tesis rortianas se dejan reconstruir y traducir en los términos habituales de las contiendas epistemológicas, prueba de que el “cambio de léxico último” perseguido por Rorty queda todavía lejos. En síntesis, del hecho de que se pueda sistematizar al filosófo edificante – imputándole una suerte de teoría (contextualista y conversacional) del “conocimiento,” una concepción (consensual o redundante) de la “verdad” y un enfoque (ético-narrativo) de la “racionalidad” y de la identidad personal – se puede deducir que nuestro autor ha muerto de éxito: su consagración académica como “filósofo profesional,” incluso como padre putativo del “pragmatismo lingüístico,” puede ser la confirmación de que los martillazos rortianos apenas han abierto grietas en el sólido muro de la filosofía sistemática. Pues, en pocas palabras, lo último que habría deseado el hombre que mató a la verdad es permanecer en la posteridad como un capítulo más de la historia de la teoría del conocimiento. Y sospechamos que ese es, en estos momentos, el lugar que le está reservando el paso del tiempo. ¡Amarga victoria!

7 Sea como fuere, el hecho es que Rosa M. Calcaterra se suma en su Filosofia della contingenza a lo que podríamos denominar la “interpretación moderada” de nuestro autor, visto ahora como un filósofo que participó (si bien de forma original y provocativa) en debates clásicos sobre problemas tradicionales de un modo menos excéntrico de lo que sus críticos sugieren. Con todo, hemos de notar que convertir el neopragmatismo en otra escuela de pensamiento que añadir a las ya establecidas, y reintroducir a Rorty en las coordenadas de las discusiones epistemológicas acostumbradas, da cuenta de la desactivación del adversario por la vía de la integración, y en cierto sentido confirma la falta de continuidad del programa de máximos rortiano. El modo como la filósofa italiana desarrolla estas cuestiones, junto con las líneas maestras del mapa que traza para orientarnos por los recovecos del corpus rortiano, será aquello que intentaremos exponer sumariamente en las páginas venideras.

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III. ¿El hombre que pudo reinar?

8 Matizado el punto de partida y el contexto general en el que cabe enmarcar la obra de la escritora italiana, conviene ahora presentar los mitos sobre nuestro autor que irán cayendo capítulo tras capítulo. De todos ellos, quizá el más extendido es el que presenta a Rorty como el gran traidor: aquella joven promesa de la filosofía analítica, simpatizante incluso de algún modo de naturalización de nuestra disciplina – así lo acreditaría, por ejemplo, el paper de 1965 que lo posicionó en el candelero de la filosofía de la mente: “Mind-body Identity, Privacy, and Categories” –, que dejó su prestigiado puesto en Princeton para dedicarse a impartir clases de literatura comparada en Virginia después de convencerse, por decirlo mediante el dictum wittgensteiniano, de que la filosofía deja todo tal y como estaba. Para colorear aún más esta descripción, se ha aludido incluso a que algunas desavenencias con sus colegas, junto con la crisis vital sufrida tras su divorcio, acabarían por decantar la decisión de abjurar definitivamente de los métodos y objetivos de la filosofía analítica para arrojarse a los brazos del pathos continental, buscando fuera de su ámbito natural el aplauso y la fama que se le negaba dentro.

9 Este tentador relato, con frecuencia malicioso y tendente al psicologismo más superficial y reduccionista, será cuestionado desde las primeras páginas de la obra de Calcaterra, contrastándolo con otra versión más verosímil y plural acerca de los motivos del progresivo cambio de enfoque de Rorty. Así, nuestra autora subraya al menos tres factores clave que apoyan la tesis de una evolución gradual y con continuidades frente a la idea de una revuelta rupturista inspirada en el resentimiento, esto es: a) la temprana afición de Rorty, presente ya en el período de su “master’s degree,” por un historicismo poco grato a sus correligionarios; b) su acreditado interés por el pragmatismo clásico, y especialmente por John Dewey, ya durante los primeros años de su carrera, hecho que desmiente la común idea de que la fascinación de Rorty por el pragmatismo fue repentina y fruto de una suerte de revelación, cuando no del oportunismo; y c) la simpatía por las aspiraciones terapéuticas de la filosofía exhibida en ciertos exponentes de la filosofía analítica del lenguaje; un interés que preconfigura su futura afirmación de que la originaria filosofía del lenguaje de tonos positivistas contenía el germen de su propia superación.

10 En oposición, pues, a la idea de que existió primero un joven Rorty entusiasta de la filosofía analítica que posteriormente se negó a sí mismo con la vehemencia del converso, Calcaterra dibuja una genealogía de los cimientos del pensamiento rortiano deudora de fuentes múltiples, que enfatiza sobre todo el precoz interés de nuestro autor por tender puentes entre tradiciones en apariencia inconmensurables (el pragmatismo clásico, la filosofía del lenguaje anglosajona y la filosofía europea poshegeliana), y que se revela a la postre como la única posición congruente con una concepción metafilosófica que le interesó desde muy pronto, aquella llamada a concretarse más adelante como “posfilosofía” o “filosofía edificante.”

11 En conclusión: el hombre que pudo reinar en la filosofía analítica nunca fue tal. La exposición de Calcaterra nos confirma, en la línea de otras interpretaciones contemporáneas (como, por ejemplo, la que en el ámbito hispano ha desarrollado Ramón del Castillo), que solo ha habido un único Rorty, un pensador inquieto que fue tomando paulatinamente mayor autoconciencia de su destino como pragmatista, y que en cierto momento de su evolución intelectual descubrió que dentro de los cánones de

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la filosofía del lenguaje no podría ejercer el tipo de filosofía a la que estaba llamado; un Rorty, digámoslo ya, que concentró las claves de su cosmovisión en una variante del “pragmatismo lingüístico” que se ha acabado conociendo como neopragmatismo. ¿Superación de la filosofía y triunfo del pensamiento débil o restauración del hombre como medida de todas las cosas?

IV. ¿El idealista lingüístico?

12 El segundo mito tenazmente repetido presenta a Rorty como el antirrealista por antonomasia, el firme defensor de un constructivismo lingüístico poco sofisticado y propulsor de la insensata idea de que “todo es lenguaje.” El ámbito del discurso, pues, como matriz que envuelve y modula cada experiencia, condiciona toda sensación, domina y dirige la percepción y delimita los contornos de la realidad. Cámbiese el vocabulario mediante el cual accedemos al mundo y cambiará el mundo mismo, pues nada contiene este último que obligue a preferir un tipo de léxico frente a su contrario. Hay tantos mundos posibles, en definitiva, como vocabularios disponibles para su descripción. Si utilizamos un determinado juego del lenguaje para acotar ciertas situaciones – por ejemplo: el vocabulario político heredado de la ilustración para interrogarnos sobre las dinámicas sociales o el léxico científico para la explicación de los fenómenos naturales –, esto no será más que el fruto de la contingencia: bien podría haber ocurrido que las causas y azares que hicieron triunfar en Occidente a las revoluciones políticas y científicas no se hubieran impuesto, y hoy nos encontraríamos utilizando otro tipo de metáforas para manejarnos con el entorno y sus exigencias. ¿Puede haber una posición menos materialista que ésta? ¿Es plausible la idea de que la redescripción es capaz de transformar efectivamente el estado de cosas que no nos satisface? ¿No hay límites naturales que nos impidan optar aleatoriamente, según las inclinaciones de nuestra voluntad, entre uno u otro léxico?

13 Rosa M. Calcaterra da un paso atrás para mostrar que la posición de Rorty resulta, cuando se analiza con lupa, mucho menos extrema de lo que aparenta. Es justo conceder que ciertos excesos verbales de Rorty, sumados a su afán vocacionalmente provocativo, no han colaborado a favorecer la necesaria caridad hermenéutica con la que sería conveniente abordar sus escritos; pero, con todo, integradas sus dispersas reflexiones en un background global, hallamos una óptica mucho más sensata, moderada y razonable. Veámosla.

14 El planteamiento rortiano se nutre de extraer todas las consecuencias a la crítica y superación del representacionismo. Que la relación entre nuestras creencias y la realidad o el mundo sea de representación implica, por de pronto, que el lenguaje se concibe como el puente que al mismo tiempo une y separa al sujeto y al objeto, imponiendo un rodeo que sella la posibilidad de una confrontación directa e ingenua con la realidad. Desde el giro cartesiano, en consecuencia, la filosofía moderna ha tratado de estrechar esa distancia postulando que en el sujeto se encuentran latentes ciertos mecanismos que, bien engrasados, pueden acercarnos a la captación de los hechos que se intenten constatar. Se trataba de pulir el espejo, mediante la filosofía, en el que la naturaleza podría al fin reflejarse en sus propios términos. Al final del camino, se reafirmaría el sujeto como “sujeto de conocimiento,” destinado a autorrealizarse cuando sea capaz de enfocar correctamente tanto su entendimiento como su voluntad, aplicando el método

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adecuado para resolver el rompecabezas de la cognición, pues la esencia del hombre, no se olvide, consistiría en ser un conocedor de esencias.

15 Este somero resumen, de sobra conocido, nos permite centrar los reparos de Rorty hacia la teoría del conocimiento que se forja en la tríada “Locke-Descartes-Kant.” En primer lugar, ésta impone una separación ontológica entre el sujeto (que representa) y el mundo (que puede ser representado), provocando una suerte de aislamiento estructural y abstracto del individuo frente al entorno: la cultura será vista, ex hypothesi, como un accidente circunstancial del que conviene desprenderse, y la razón como el destilado universal que es prescriptivo hacer aflorar desde las diversas capas de contingencias. En segundo lugar, se proyecta sobre un ámbito extrahumano la autoridad y la normatividad a la que hay que someterse: la realidad, la naturaleza, la objetividad o el mundo marcarán las pautas que, una vez detectadas, será prescriptivo implementar si hay visos de alcanzar algún conocimiento certero. En tercer lugar, revalida la distinción positivista entre hechos y valores, olvidando que toda descripción persigue unos fines y que toda finalidad se construye mediante valores e intereses (uno de los pilares del pragmatismo es, de hecho, el intento en diferentes grados por difuminar esta frontera). Y, por último, acarrea la aceptación de una filosofía del lenguaje de dudosa consistencia. Nos centraremos a continuación, siguiendo a Calcaterra, en este último punto, pues da la medida de la perspectiva rortiana.

16 Si el lenguaje es concebido como el mediador entre el sujeto y la realidad, esto significa no solo que el sujeto está aislado de su circunstancia, sino también que la propia realidad está escindida, tajantemente separada, del individuo. La realidad es lo otro. Se perpetúa, así, un paradigma en el que sujeto y objeto son realidades metafísicamente incomensurables al menos en algún punto, tanto como antaño lo fueron la divinidad y sus feligreses. Este presupuesto permite dos reacciones, que podemos rotular como la moderna y la posmoderna: la primera, que podemos simplificar como realista y racionalista, defenderá que es posible hallar un camino que se aproxime en alto grado a la estructura constitutiva de aquella realidad fáctica; la posmoderna, codificable como constructivista y posromántica, se felicitará de esa demarcación ontológica y apostará por la creación de mundos en base al discurso, única alternativa posible tras tomar conciencia de los insuperables límites del lenguaje y de la incognoscibilidad de la realidad en sí. Sin embargo, ha de notarse que ambas reacciones están presas de las mismas asunciones y postulados en lo que atañe al vínculo entre lenguaje y realidad; como Rorty ha criticado con dureza el realismo metafísico, ha sido habitual ingresarlo en las apretadas filas de la posmodernidad, sin reparar en que su artillería dispara contra el marco general que condiciona el debate. Digámoslo en pocas palabras: el “pragmatismo lingüístico” de Rorty no afirma que todo es lenguaje, sino que el lenguaje está en todo. Y esta diferencia es abismal. Como lo expresa la profesora Calcaterra, non vi è realtà comprensibile o da comprendere che non passi attraverso il linguaggio ma questo non significa dissolvere il concetto di realtà in una sorta di idealismo linguistico. Semplicemente si prende atto della coestensività di linguaggio e realtà, riconoscendola appunto come un appannaggio ‘naturale’ degli esseri umani, che si mostra e si giustifica mediante le loro pratiche conoscitive e valoriali. (p. 52)

17 La hipótesis rortiana desemboca así en la convicción de que el conjunto de dicotomías reforzadas por la epistemología moderna – lenguaje/realidad, sujeto/objeto, conciencia/materia, naturaleza/cultura, razón/emoción, etc. – es el desagradable subproducto de una concepción del lenguaje condenada a atascarse en contradicciones

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a causa de su asunción acrítica del conocimiento como agrupación de representaciones. El alegato por la “coextensividad del lenguaje y la realidad,” retomando la sugerente fórmula de Calcaterra, subraya además la imposibilidad de aislar como prelingüístico algún tipo de dato sensorial o experiencia privilegiada, puesto que un gesto así restauraría la primacía de un “mundo interior” en el que se imprimiría la huella provocada por el “mundo externo,” y con este binomio resucitaría asimismo la idea de un locus donde podría resplandecer alguna impresión o sensación pura, incontaminada de lenguaje y garantía del ajuste entre la representación interna y su causa objetiva.

18 En oposición, la alternativa rortiana a enfrentar lenguaje y realidad – pecado original del representacionismo –, vindica una suerte de “holismo epistemológico” en el que, por concluir esta sección con el acertado resumen de Calcaterra, “occorre adottare una visuale interrelazionale e dinamica dei processi conoscitivi […] [per] far valere l’aggancio funzionale e costante dell’ambito sensibile con quello intellettuale” (p. 75-6). Lo que está en juego, se habrá intuido ya, es en última instancia la imagen del ser humano que estamos dispuestos a aceptar y promover, de modo que no resulta sorprendente que con el paso del tiempo Rorty tomara mayor conciencia de la necesidad de centrar sus reflexiones en la identidad personal y sus concomitancias éticas.

19 Se simpatice o no con este panorama, convengamos en que estos matices espantan el fantasma del idealismo lingüístico que con tanta asiduidad se ha agitado sobre nuestro filósofo. Otra cuestión es si Rorty logra efectivamente una auténtica disolución de la pugna entre realismo y antirrealismo, o si su crítica a la noción de experiencia supone una revisión radical del pragmatismo clásico o más bien la culminación natural de sus principios; temas capitales que sobrepasan las posibilidades de esta reseña, pero que en la obra de Calcaterra se encuentran profusa y vigorosamente desarrollados.

V. Consecuencias del ironismo

20 “Justice as Larger Loyalty,” “Anti-Representationalism, and Liberalism” y “On Ethnocentrism: a Reply to Clifford Geertz” son los textos donde se desarrollan con mayor claridad las consecuencias antropológicas del ironismo liberal que Rorty venía concibiendo, al menos, desde el libro que siempre reivindicó como su obra de madurez: Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. En esos lugares se actualizaba una cuestión que, bien mirada, había preocupado a nuestro autor desde años atrás (como atestiguan, sin ir más lejos, otros dos ensayos nucleares: “Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism” [1983] y “Cosmopolitanism without Emancipation” [1985]), a saber: ¿cómo defender ciertas instituciones democráticas sin hacerlas depender del sustrato metafísico y racionalista que las informa? ¿Cómo promulgar la (presunta) tolerancia liberal sin invocar el vocabulario universalista de los derechos humanos ahistóricos y la dignidad intrínseca de todo ser humano? ¿De qué manera promocionar la disminución de la crueldad, y los compromisos morales que la acompañan, sin recurrir a una deontología derivada del descubrimiento de algún fundamento racional? La respuesta a estos interrogantes ha encumbrado el otro mito que Calcaterra pondrá en francos apuros, esto es: el Rorty que se suma a la popular moda intelectual del relativismo haciendo depender la validez de toda norma moral de la forma de vida comunitaria que la implementa (rescatando así el trasnochado y reaccionario programa de reducir la ética a la moral concreta de la “provincia” en la que el individuo se socializa). Si antes cualquier creencia podía ser

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verdadera, ahora cualquier conducta puede ser buena, pues este sería el coste de disolver las pretensiones de verdad en los estándares contingentes y variables de una justificación contextualista.

21 Ésta posición, además, nacía condenada a disgustar a todo el espectro político y filosófico del momento: a los guardianes conservadores de la moral por equiparar los códigos del pueblo elegido (vale decir: del Occidente que alimenta su ethos con el abono de la tradición judeocristiana) con los de los bárbaros; a la progresía socialdemócrata – paradigmática en este sentido su larga y fraternal polémica con Habermas – por negar la existencia de un criterio racional que garantice la preferencia por las maneras de las democracias liberales; y también incluso a los relativistas convencidos, en la resaca de los estudios poscoloniales, de la verdad de los oprimidos, por disfrazar con el ropaje del relativismo lo que a la postre quizá sea simple orgullo patriótico americano, habida cuenta de la implícita legitimación proselitista de los usos y costumbres de su país.

22 Así las cosas, la autora italiana contraataca esta lectura con una estrategia basada en explicitar la codependencia entre etnocentrismo, perfeccionismo y solidaridad, como los tres vértices indisociables del planteamiento rortiano. Su etnocentrismo, así, se disloca de la vertiente estrictamente moral, ya que no se trata de afirmar la igualación de toda norma de conducta, sino de mostrar que ningún código axiológico está más próximo a cómo deberían ser las cosas en función de la naturaleza humana, el horizonte del progreso o algún imperativo trascendente (de forma pareja a cómo ningún vocabulario descriptivo contiene en sí mismo el telos de la correspondencia). El perfeccionismo, por su parte, emerge como el correlato de esta equiparación epistemológica entre todos los discursos morales, pues ya no es preciso someterse al imperio de algún punto de referencia fijo (sea este la “maximin rule,” el entendimiento como finalidad inmanente de la conversación o el respeto a los atributos innatos de la persona), sino de ser capaces, redescripción mediante, de traspasar la línea que separa lo “viejo” de lo “nuevo” tanto a nivel individual como colectivo. Por último, una vez constatada la imposibilidad de hallar algún procedimiento de normatividad unívoco y universalizable, nos resta la solidaridad entre iguales y la responsabilidad con la comunidad de pertenencia como la idea reguladora que debiera desarrollarse, y esto sin necesidad de justificación última, simplemente asumiendo que a nivel teórico esto es todo lo que puede decirse a propósito del modo de ser moral del animal humano. El conocimiento queda, entonces, felizmente disuelto en la solidaridad.

23 Este último punto es crucial, pues muestra la única salida viable tras asumir el mandato de la contingencia, lo que a estas alturas ya puede hacerse equivaler con el triunfo del historicismo; un historicismo que apuntala los pilares de la “antropología pragmática” que Rorty delinea con todos estos materiales, y que se presenta ahora como la única vía posible tras el naufragio del fundacionismo tradicional y la mitología racionalista. De nuevo, se trata de hacer pedagogía de una imagen del ser humano radicalmente antiesencialista, vista ahora como el resultado de integrar y combinar en la “red de creencias y deseos” que nos constituye cualesquiera elementos de las diversas voces que conforman la “conversación de la humanidad,” sin que haya práctica alguna que pueda reclamar para sí la prerrogativa de dar respuesta cabal a aquella célebre pregunta kantiana: “¿qué es el ser humano?”; una identidad perpetuamente abierta, móvil, experimental, contingente, fabricada con los mimbres de la imaginación y volcada en nuevos usos de conceptos concebidos como guías de acción práctica; una

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identidad, en definitiva, de raíces narrativas más cercana al fin del animal fantástico que del animal racional.

24 Si estamos frente a la única Ilustación posible o ante los últimos estertores del Romanticismo vuelve a ser un dilema que sobrepasa el reducido espacio de estas páginas; pero esperamos, al menos, haber derruido la caricatura de aquel cínico enfant terrible para quien todas las voces son válidas a condición de que no amenacen el Imperio Americano.

VI. Conclusión: ¿superación de la epistemología o final de la filosofía?

25 Llegamos así al último lugar común que nos interesa combatir, aquel que resume todos los anteriores y que hemos insinuado desde el comienzo de estas páginas: Rorty como el último miembro del abultado cártel que ha planeado, con alevosía y premeditación, el homicidio de la filosofía. Su célebre llamamiento a impulsar una “cultura posfilosófica” plantea diversos problemas, de entre los que nos interesa destacar el siguiente por constituir el polo desde el que Calcaterra ensaya la réplica.

26 Con la dinamitación del enfoque normativo de la reflexión filosófica, y la consiguiente devaluación de las tres nociones que quizá conformen la estructura constitutiva del pensamiento occidental – es decir: la verdad, la realidad y la racionalidad –, se está negando a su vez el gran objetivo que la Ilustración postulara para con el género humano: la emancipación. Y, si no hay emancipación posible, ¿dónde queda la añorada capacidad transformadora de la filosofía? Lo que nos resta, tras la demolición neopragmatista, ¿no será que una concepción del conocimiento y de la ética como el conjunto de aseveraciones consensuadas frente a un auditorio o contexto dado, siempre falible y carente de referencias y criterios transculturales que aseguren la validez incondicionada de las mismas? ¿Habrá que conformarse con que lo único que puede ofrecer la filosofía en esta tesitura sean algunos elementos, sin especificidad propia, que coadyuven a la redescripción? ¿Habrá que celebrar esta reducción de la filosofía a la literatura, cuando no su subordinación? ¿Habrá que invertir a Marx y declamar que los filósofos no han hecho más que (intentar) transformar de diversos modos el mundo, pero de lo que se trata ahora es de (re)interpretarlo? Toparíamos así con dos desagradables consecuencias de la cosmovisión neopragmatista: por un lado, el ironismo, más cercano ahora al cinismo que al sarcasmo, no devendría sino contemporización con el estado de cosas vigente; y, por otro, la filosofía debería cancelarse dialécticamente a sí misma en una suerte de último servicio sacrificial en pro de una supuesta cultura mejorada, lo que nos dejaría en manos de presuntos expertos y técnicos llamados a sustituir a la deleznable figura del intelectual – cuyo paradigma es el filósofo – por haberse comportado históricamente como “el más orgulloso de los hombres.”

27 Todos los capítulos de la obra de Calcaterra pueden leerse, a nuestro juicio, como una enmienda a esta interpretación. Si algo queda meridiano en la erudita exposición de la obra es que el pensamiento rortiano se presta a equívocos si no se visualiza correctamente la interdependencia entre metafilosofía, epistemología y teoría de la racionalidad; una red conceptual que se torna explícita en diferentes pasajes del libro y cuyos vínculos tal vez puedan condensarse como sigue: el tipo de epistemología que

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uno profese arrastrará, quiérase o no, unas marcadas concepciones acerca de qué sea el sujeto y, eo ipso, de la naturaleza y funciones de la propia filosofía. Poner al descubierto este esquema, y mostrar que la contingencia envuelve toda instanciación conceptual que propongamos como relleno de sus variables, permitiría vislumbrar un tipo de sujeto capaz de volcarse en el perfeccionamiento tanto de sí mismo como de su sociedad.

28 Desde esta óptica, la dimensión ética del proyecto de Rorty se nos aparece como el centro de su propuesta, y en esta primacía de la ética se desmiente tanto la interpretación conservadora de su liberalismo como la sumaria condena a la filosofía que con frecuencia se le ha imputado. La clave de todo el programa de Rorty se sitúa, entonces, en la apología de esa antropología pragmática que esbozamos en la sección anterior; liberándonos de una noción cosificada y esencialista del sujeto, a través del antídoto crítico y edificante de la filosofía, abriremos la posibilidad de una “libertad contingente” con la solidaridad y la responsabilidad como guías políticas y la esperanza en el futuro como horizonte. Resulta harto dudoso que estas motivaciones deban leerse como consentimiento tácito a “lo que hay,” y más dudoso todavía que una empresa tal pueda realizarse sin la ayuda de la filosofía. Sirvannos, pues, como conclusión provisional, las siguientes palabras de Calcaterra; y celebremos, en consecuencia, no solo que la filosofía no ha (des)fallecido todavía, sino que la contingencia puede proveerle del aliento necesario para sobrevivir largo tiempo dedicándose por fin a lo que de verdad debería importarle: [quella di Rorty] È un'attitudine cui egli contribuisce mediante l’appello a vivificare l’impegno in un incremento dei sentimenti di solidarietà umana, della loro insostituibile abilità di fronteggiare l’oppressione e le crudeltà, affidandosi non già alle istanze razionaliste bensì al potere dell’immaginazione e delle narrazioni letterarie. (p. 197)

AUTORES

FRANCISCO JAVIER RUIZ MOSCARDÓ

Universitat de València ruizmos2[at]uv.es

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Book Review

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George Herbert MEAD, Mind Self & Society. The Definitive Edition Edited by Charles W. Morris. Annoted Edition by Daniel R. Huebner and Hans Joas, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London 2015

Guido Baggio

REFERENCES

George Herbert MEAD, Mind Self & Society. The Definitive Edition. Edited by Charles W. Morris. Annoted Edition by Daniel R. Huebner and Hans Joas, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London 2015

1 The publication of G. H. Mead’s Mind Self & Society. The Definitive Edition has been long awaited by scholars and historians of the thought of the philosopher and pragmatist social psychologist. The editorial project of the University of Chicago Press followed this Definitive Edition with the publication of The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead (2016), a collection of the proceedings of the international conference held in April 2013 at the University of Chicago, also edited by Hans Joas and Daniel Huebner and already reviewed in this Journal (IX, 2, 2016).

2 The re-edition of Mind, Self & Society is one of the most valuable achievements of the collaboration of Huebner and Joas. It offers a fundamental contribution to the ‘Mead Renaissance’ unfolding in various disciplinary fields – from philosophy to psychology, from to cognitive sciences – behind which there is a historiographic and theoretical intent to rehabilitate George H. Mead’s thought as one of the great classics of American philosophical, psychological and sociological thought.

3 As is well known, Mind, Self & Society is Mead’s second posthumous volume. It is the work of Morris’s impressive editorial work, which brings together “twelve sets of classroom materials (stenographers’ transcripts, students’ notes, and students’ class papers)” of the Advanced Social Psychology course held in 1928 and 1930 (with

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references in the notes also to Morris’s notes taken during the course of 1924), and “at least eight different manuscript fragments written by George H. Mead” (p. 391).

4 The new edition of 2015, with a foreword by Joas, presents also an appendix on Mead’s sources thanks to rigorous work by Huebner. The appendix is, indeed, the real treasure of this new edition, the text of which, with the numbering of the pages, remains the same as the 1934 edition, with some correction of misprints included in the first edition. Huebner’s reconstruction offers an insight into Morris’s editorial work, which is noteworthy, given that it is thanks to him that Mead’s thought has become known to most; but in some respects, Morris misguides us by introducing questionable interpretative canons to the reader in a way that is perhaps too invasive. The critical analysis of sources such as that carried out by Huebner allows us to remodel and relocate this work of Mead within an overall assessment of his production.

5 The first and most obvious example of Morris’s editorial invasiveness that Huebner highlights is the definition of ‘social behaviorist’ that in the first chapter Morris attributes to Mead. As Huebner notes, at many points of the first chapter of Mind, Self & Society, “the wording of the source material has been modified so as to draw a sharper distinction between Mead’s meaning of the term ‘’ and a ‘narrow,’ or Watsonian, understanding of the term” (397). So intrusive is Morris’s ‘editing’ that at the end of the ninth paragraph he adds the sentence “Our behaviorism is a social behaviorism,” just as he adds all the occurrences of the expression ‘social behaviorism’ present in the volume. As is well known, Mead had clearly distinguished his position from ’s since the 1920s. He repeatedly stressed the importance of the use of behavioral psychology for the understanding of the mental processes of the human being. However, he also specified that the observation of behavior should be considered as one of the methods of psychology, not the only one: it is inevitable to take the observation of behavior as a starting point, but one cannot a-priori deny consciousness because there is no agreement on the meaning of this term. As this passage from the appendix explains: “To account for them [i.e., mind or consciousness] thus is not to reduce them to the status of non-mental psychological phenomena, as Watson supposes – is not to show that they are not really mental at all; but is simply to show that they are a particular type of behavioristic phenomena, or one type of behavioristic phenomena among others” (399). Furthermore, it is worth noting that in a lecture on behaviorism in Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, one of a series that Mead delivered in 1928 and which were subsequently edited into book form by Merritt H. Moore in 1936, he distinguished two perspectives from which to consider the notion of ‘behavior’: the Watsonian perspective, according to which the process of the organism is seen from an external point of view; and the Deweyan perspective, which also includes in human behavior the different values associated with the notion of ‘consciousness.’ In particular, the Deweyan perspective, which interprets consciousness in functional terms as an experience of the interaction of the individual with the physical and social environment, allows us to overcome the reductionist pattern of stimulus-response – an echo of the ancient dualism between sensation and idea – and to consider human conduct as the active product of the inhibition of actions initially correlated to physiological impulses.

6 Other important points that Huebner reports include Mead’s reference to Darwin which has been omitted from the chapter “The Behavioristic Significance of Gestures,” and a reformulation of the explanation of in the fourth chapter, as well as a

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passage concerning the physiology of attention (404). Related to this last topic is a very interesting formulation of the problems of parallelism omitted from the chapter on “Parallelism and the Ambiguity of ‘Consciousness’.” Here Mead states: “If we are going to restrict the field of consciousness to that which psychology deals with we have left an organism which is stated in physical, or if you like in physiological, terms and the rest of the field of our experiences is brought within the range of so-called consciousness. This content, however, is one which we cannot completely bring within the range of our psychological investigation. We can’t get it completely out of the field of physiological science” (406). Mead then continues by highlighting the ambiguity with which parallelism considers consciousness: “If we are to be quite consistent in it we have to regard the physiological system simply as a group of electrons and and take out of it all the meanings that attached to them as specific physiological objects and lodge them in a consciousness. We find difficulty even with that. But supposing we did, we could not have the sort of physiological organisms which the physiologist implies as a counterpart of the psychological process. We could get all of consciousness on one side and on the other side a purely physical organism that has no content of consciousness at all” (407).

7 In a further passage omitted from chapter thirty on “The basis of human society: man and insects,” Mead resumes the theory of the importance of the human hand that will then play an even more important role in the perceptual theory found in The Philosophy of the Act (1938): “A beefsteak, an apple, is a thing. It may be the stimulus which sets the process going, but it is a thing. There is a category under which you can bring all these stimuli which are qualitatively different but they are all things. The hand, with the erect posture of the human animal, is something in which he comes in contact, something by which he grasps. […] It is that utilization of the hand within the act which has given to the human animal his world of physical things” (462).

8 Other interesting aspects concern the complex nuances Mead places on the distinction between ‘I’ and ‘Me’ and on the partially unpredictable character of the ‘I’ with respect to ‘Me’ (455), as well as on the relationship between self and the situational context (472). Moreover, the ambiguity highlighted by Huebner in the use of the expressions ‘universal discourse’ and ‘universe of discourse’ (451-2) is particularly evident. Concerning this and other points, Huebner notes how difficult it is to determine how much Mead contributed to their formulation. It is quite clear, in fact, that the stenographer has misunderstood or mis-transcribed certain points and Morris’s hand has added ambiguity to ambiguity with the intention of correcting them.

9 In addition to highlighting Morris’s heavy editorial work, the additional explanations Mead provided following the questions the students asked him, in which he offered “a unique standpoint on Mead’s teachings” (392), are useful for orientation in Mead’s work. Worthy of note, for example, is the additional discussion Mead offers about the mechanism of language learning and the contrast between language learning in humans and birds: “The vocalizing which the individual makes in their beginning of the phonetic process are in a great many respects identical with those which it hears. There are emphasized, they are the ones that come back, select and repeat themselves. Here we have a mechanism out of which the significant symbol arises. You couldn’t call, of course, the vocalization which you get in the parrot, under such conditions, significant symbols. They have no meaning to the parrot such as they have in human

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society. They do not enter into the process which these vocalizations mediate in the human society, but the mechanics of it is the same” (416).

10 Worth noting is also the answer, linked to this discussion, to a question not included in the published text, concerning the responses to stimuli, in which Mead argues that some vocal elements that have emotional reactions evoke the same responses in the person who emits it as in the person who receives it (416). Or again, the answer he offers to the following question: “Can an individual be conscious of an object without responding to it?” omitted from chapter 22 on “The ‘I’ and the ‘Me’.” Mead responds to the question by highlighting the need to clarify the meaning of consciousness: “As I have said the term ‘conscious’ is ambiguous, we use it sometimes when we simply mean the presence of the object in our experience and also where we have a definite conscious relation” (445). It depends on the type of responses to certain stimuli: certain responses are present in attitudes, and they are beginnings of reactions, responses to an object that are included in our experience. In this sense, there is consciousness of the object. To this explanation is linked the question: “Wouldn’t you think we have a consciousness of physical self as well as a social self?,” to which Mead answers that: “under ordinary circumstances we don’t distinguish between our physical self and the social self. It is the physical self which is the social self. It is the self which has such and such expression, wears such and such clothes. That is the social self, because those go to make up the characters that call out the social responses” (446).

11 In the appendix to the text it is also possible to find many bibliographical references Mead used in his lectures. For example, in Mead’s explanation of multiple personalities in the chapter on the constitution of the self (ch. 18, ¶ 11), the references to Morton Prince’s The Dissociation of a Personality (1905) and The Unconscious (1914) are made explicit.

12 We cannot report here all the interesting details that, thanks to Huebner’s work, become salient in Mead’s volume. What must be reiterated is that the re-edition of such an important work in the philosophical, sociological and psychological panorama of the twentieth century offers an essential contribution to various disciplines that are now undergoing rapid change. As Joas states in the Foreword of this new edition, in “an age of rapid advances in cognitive and and of enormous public interest in a new ‘naturalism,’ Mead’s ideas deserve greatest attention” (xii). Mead, in fact, is an author who can still offer a significant contribution to the development of the different socio-psychological disciplines. The recognition of the primary sources of the text and the precise identification of the editorial work make this new edition the point of reference for any scholar who wants to approach the work of Mead, and want to draw from it some crucial insights and critical reflections.

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AUTHORS

GUIDO BAGGIO

Università degli Studi Roma Tre guido.baggio[at]uniroma3.it

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Joëlle ZASK, La Démocratie aux Champs Paris, La Découverte, 2016, 256 pages

Céline Henne

REFERENCES

Joëlle ZASK, La Démocratie aux Champs, Paris, La Découverte, 2016, 256 pages

1 In her book La Démocratie aux Champs, French philosopher Joëlle Zask wishes to overturn the longstanding prejudice according to which democratic ideals essentially grow out of and thrive in big cities, and are antithetical to agricultural life. Whether in 19th century Europe or in contemporary United States, peasants are widely seen as conservative, bigoted and apolitical, while urban residents typically represent a more progressive and politically minded population. Against this view, but also against the alternative view of a romanticized and idyllic rural world, Zask defends the idea that the values and practices associated with democratic freedom “primarily come […] from the farm” (p. 7). “Farm” is to be understood broadly: the scope of her book is not restricted to the peasant lifeworld, but encompasses different kinds of agriculture, including urban community gardens.

2 Zask is not the first one to defend such a view. Most of the empirical material used to support her philosophical arguments comes from existing historical and sociological studies describing democratic practices, experiences and modes of organization in collective farms, community gardens or peasants’ political movements. The originality of Zask’s book lies in the scope of her argument and in the use she makes of these local experiments to defend a more general claim about the nature of democracy. Already existing studies are most often published as articles and always focus on particular experiments (e.g., Jefferson’s “ward ,” jardins ouvriers in 19th century France, ’s community gardens). In contrast to these studies, Zask’s book is the first extensive study that makes a general claim about the democratic benefits of growing and cultivating land, gathering and articulating these independent studies into a broader philosophical and political perspective.

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3 In her presentation of farming practices and communities as the cradle of democracy, Zask is adopting a conception of democracy that is essentially pragmatist, and more specifically Deweyan. She rejects the view of democracy as a mere system of , comprising particular electoral procedures and a number of civil rights and liberties. For Zask – as for Dewey – democracy is a “way of life,” a set of practices based on social involvement and cooperation that foster opportunities for self- cultivation. In Zask’s words, her focus on agricultural practices is meant to convey an image of democracy as a “garden” rather than a “machine” (12), and as a social and political system which is not as much about deliberation and decision-making, as it is about “doing together (faire ensemble)” (15).

4 The book is easily accessible to readers that are familiar with neither pragmatism nor contemporary . Instead of giving a systematic presentation of theoretical ideas, articulated in deductive arguments and illustrated by case studies, Zask proceeds in a very pragmatist fashion, by starting from the study of concrete experiments, thus introducing political and philosophical ideas in a very intuitive manner. This methodology also reflects a voluntary take on what democratic theory should be about: not a utopian ideal or distant horizon, but the generalization of practices that already exist and have proven successful.

5 While Zask is well-known in France as a specialist of Dewey’s political philosophy (see L’opinion publique et son double, in two volumes: Livre I : L’opinion sondée; Livre II : John Dewey, philosophe du public, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1999-2000), Dewey’s name is mentioned only a few times in this book, almost always en passant. But pragmatist concepts and ideas are used throughout the book as tools to bring out particular features of the practices that she is describing. This makes her book a very good introduction to the pragmatist conception of democracy, as well as to her own political philosophy, which she exposed in one of her previous books Participer. Essai sur les formes démocratiques de la participation (Le Bord de l’eau, 2011).

6 The book is divided into four chapters, each focusing on a specific aspect of the relation between agriculture (broadly speaking) and democracy. I will now present the main arguments of each chapter, and conclude with some critical remarks.

7 While the title of the book (Democracy in the fields) portended a topic centered on rural communities, with an expected emphasis on collective organization, Zask surprisingly starts her book with a first chapter on the cultivation of the individual, entitled “cultivation of land, cultivation of self” (culture de la terre, culture de soi). She explains this choice by stating that in democracy, groups and individuals are not antagonistic, quite the contrary: “individuals benefit from the group as much as groups benefit from individual contributions; the more assertive, cultivated and balanced individuals are, the more active and energetic the groups they constitute” (19). Zask makes it clear that, in her view, the “individual” should not be seen as a static and finished product, but as a process: and indeed, the chapter is much more about individuation than individuality per se.

8 The central idea of the chapter is that freedom and individuation are two inseparable democratic values, particularly instantiated in and fostered by the activity of cultivating land. After an introductory part – perhaps longer than it needed be, for philosophical purposes – on foundational myths which equate the birth of agriculture with that of civilization, she turns to the ideal of the independent farmer in Jefferson’s America.

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9 Jefferson was guided by the idea that individuals can only flourish by participating actively in the organization of their own existence (36). By choosing to go back to Jefferson’s conception of the democratic ideal as that of “self-government,” Zask explicitly distinguishes her conception of freedom from the free-will of an isolated individual: “the insular freedom of an autonomous subject, defended by the liberal and republican tradition, is replaced by the dialogical and connected freedom (liberté dialogique et solidaire) of an independent subject” (39). “Independence” here is certainly not to be equated with an absence of resistance, interference or obstacle; on the contrary, she is referring to a “concrete and realistic” (38) kind of freedom, which develops itself in relation to and in confrontation with other subjects and objects.

10 This freedom-independence is perfectly exemplified, according to her, in the cultivation of land. Farming implies a relation of co-dependence and reciprocity between the farmer and the cultivated land – she talks of their “shared interests” – rather than of domination and exploitation of one on the other, which would lead to the destruction of both. It becomes clear, if it wasn’t already the case before, that by presenting “agriculture” as the fertile ground for democracy, Zask was never referring to the industrial intensive farming that is so widespread today.

11 Zask emphasizes several times the contingent character of individuation and independence. A full-blown individuality, which implies the kind of independence described above, is neither innate nor acquired once and for all. Zask insists that the development of freedom does not only require an effort on the part of the individual (such as the one found in cultivating a land), but also “favorable conditions” (43) external to the individual. The democratic government, which thrives on individual freedom, reciprocally needs to protect and foster it with legal and institutional guarantees (44). While Zask cites the importance of the Constitution and of its periodic revision, she leaves open the specific kind of governmental organization required for the development of democratic freedom.

12 The last part of the chapter, on cultivation as a means of education – with a focus on small-scale gardening – is the most explicitly Deweyan section of the book. Zask recapitulates Dewey’s conception of experience as a series of anticipations, confrontations and adjustments, which is then illustrated with examples from Maria Montessori’s teachings and schools. While it is not exactly clear how gardening develops individuality per se, Zask convincingly shows how it can foster independence and experimental habits of mind.

13 The second chapter centers on the social value of communal gardens, thus complementing the first chapter on individuality. The main idea defended by Zask is that communal gardens are the “privileged place” for the development of social qualities such as “solidarity, transmission, sharing, cooperation and equal task division” (69). The particular interest she finds in the study of communal gardens is their successful combination of the individual and the collective, superseding the failures of both and collectivism. These “agricultural microsocieties,” as she calls them (71), have first and foremost a human and social finality (before other external finalities such as profit or material security), and in that sense, exemplify a kind of sociability which “accomplishes in an informal way all the principles and rules that political democracy accomplishes at a political and legal level” (71).

14 Zask is careful to distinguish the experiments she discusses (household plots in USSR, allotment gardens, urban communal gardens, jardins ouvriers, Kleingärten, etc.) from

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seemingly similar collective farming experiments, such as USSR kolkhozes or 19th century paternalist utopias in France. The latter lack freedom of interaction, being guided by strict external rules and fixed productionist, hygienist and/or moral aims.

15 Accordingly, Zask is less interested in governmental agrarian reform plans than in spontaneous individual or collective initiatives and organizations, where the conditions, means and ends of farming are determined by the individuals themselves. She takes the example, among others, of communal gardens in New York City. She explains that such gardens apply a principle of equality where “equality is not postulated nor respected, but created” (109). Class, wealth and educational differences are abolished – though only, admittedly, within the specific time and space in which communal gardening occurs. Zask also defends the kind of multiculturalism naturally promoted by these experiments, which she says is less about the affirmation of an identity than about “permanent and reciprocal adjustment between different cultures” (112), in line with Malinowski’s view of cultural borrowing.

16 More generally, Zask highlights the fact that communal gardens are at the center of urban villages, which themselves contribute to the reestablishment of social connections formerly disintegrated by the advancement of big cities. Here, one might have expected a comparative development on the effect of big cities on individuality and social relations, such as those that can be found in Dewey’s remarks on the “lost individual” (Individualism, Old and New) and the “eclipse of the public” (The Public and its Problems). Such a development would perhaps have permitted to bring to light the particularity and benefits of gardening practices as compared with other, more typically urban, activities.

17 Zask ends the chapter with a section on the social and therapeutic benefits of gardening, citing examples of programs for the reinsertion of former convicts, mental health patients or veterans. Marginalized individuals learn to develop a common goal and a sense of community, and psychologically troubled patients learn how to become active caring subjects, instead of just passive objects of care. While this section’s link with democracy or social virtues is less obvious at first, she convincingly explains how the restoration of autonomy through gardening (instead of paternalist methods) can be an important step towards social inclusion and reintegration.

18 The third chapter takes on a more explicit political focus. Zask opposes the vision, shared as much by Rousseau as by Marx and 19th century French republicans, of farmers as apolitical or, at best, reactionary. In this chapter, she defends the idea that farmers possess “their own art of governing, a taste for independence and an irreplaceable knowledge of their complex realities” (140).

19 Drawing on several historical studies, Zask claims that many local and farm managements in rural areas were “democratic” before there was even a name for it. She writes: “autonomy in villages was in fact greater at the time of monarchical and feudal institutions than it has been under the representative system of our liberal democracy” (141). While it would be difficult to present the feudal system itself as a great model of democracy, one can easily recognize with Zask that farmers and villagers were given much more power in managing their daily affairs. By referring back to these ancient systems, usually discarded altogether because of their antidemocratic character, Zask actually advocates a local democracy, against the controlling authority of a centralized state, which largely characterizes our contemporary liberal .

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20 Along with local self-government, Zask praises the conceptions of property that she sees implied in democratic farming communities. The cultivation of land, according to her, goes hand in hand with a criticism of absolute and exclusive property (usually associated with liberal democracy) as well as collectivist property, and promotes instead a model of shared resources and equal distribution – here, she cites Elinor Ostrom’s work on the commons (1990). In this type of organization, institutional and legal means are not used to protect individual property and enable its concentration, but rather to limit appropriation and insure the fair distribution of land plots to everyone.

21 This chapter is rich in historical and contemporary examples of farmers politically organizing themselves to fight for the management of their lands and the preservation of their rights, from 16th century German Peasants’ War, to the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) born in Brazil the 1980s. These movements have arisen against the expropriation of peasants and, today, the appropriation of lands by multinational . Zask describes the sophisticated independent civil societies still growing in Brazil, based on shared management, shared goods and high levels of participation and involvement from individuals, where cultivating land becomes a means of empowerment for excluded farmers and other outcasts.

22 The fourth chapter is the shortest one; it also has less unity and richness of content than the others. It focuses on two main topics: the “everyday politics” of farming communities, and the relation between agricultural science and farmers’ first-hand experience. In the first section, she expands on the concept of “common” (further analyzed by Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval in Commun. Essai sur la révolution au XXe siècle, 2014) and on the democratic practices involved in self-government, without adding much substantially new content to the previous chapters. She insists on the importance of “regular, or even daily participation of individuals to initiatives and decisions concerning their everyday affairs” (214), endorsing a demanding participatory conception of democracy that was also defended by pragmatists such as Dewey or Mary Parker Follett.

23 In the second section, Zask contrasts the model of agricultural science based on deliberate methods of observation, experimentation and transmission, to the agronomical movement which “stripped peasants of their status of experimenters, and reduced them to mere implementers” (219). She criticizes the idea of a rational agronomical science to be imposed on supposedly ignorant farmers hostile to progress, thus marking the end of “agriculture as experience” (221). Farmers in the agroindustry suffer from a multiple disqualification: dispossessed of their land and its products destined to be exported, working for a company, they also become mere subordinates to “expert” knowledge, their skills being reduced to a “routine know-how” (222). Zask defends a view of “agroecology” which combines modern science and the traditional and experimental knowledge of farmers, obeying to logics of preservation and instead of increasing .

24 On the whole, Zask’s book is convincing, informative and pleasant to read. It brings an important and needed focus on an underdeveloped topic in democratic theory. She succeeds in overturning caricatures attached to the rural world, and conveys an interesting view of democracy, in line with the Deweyan ideal of democracy as a “way of life.” However, some critical remarks can be made concerning the formulation and demonstration of her general argument. The announced thesis of her book is that “our

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ideal of democratic freedom does not primarily come from the factory, from Enlightenment, from commerce, from cities or from cosmopolitanism, but from the farm” (7). In the next sentence, she makes it clear that she is less interested in making a historical claim about the origins of democracy, than in defending the idea that agriculture itself (broadly conceived) is naturally conducive to the development of democratic values and practices. This is a rather strong claim, even if she is careful to qualify or anticipate possible misreadings: “interactions between cultivators and their lands foster democratic ways of life and, without being their cause or exclusive origin, maintain and reinforce them” (7, emphasis added). Still, the claim implies the existence of specific traits of agriculture which make it conducive to democracy (this becomes explicit a few sentences below: “there are elements, in the very fact of cultivating land, that predispose to the development of the values associated with democracy”). However, it is not clear whether Zask succeeds in giving a full demonstration of this particular implication.

25 The issue pertains to the nature of the causal link which is supposed to exist between agriculture and democratic ways of life, when she claims that agriculture “fosters,” “maintains” and “reinforces” them. In the examples cited by Zask in the first and second chapters, democratic modes of organization seem to both precede and condition the positive influence of agriculture on the development of farmers’ independence and/or civic virtues. For example, in the first chapter, Zask acknowledges that, while also cultivating land, day laborers and slaves “do not develop any responsibility, public spirit, sense of freedom, or self-government skills” (39), as opposed to farmers in Jefferson’s “ward republics.” The same remark can be made about the second chapter: the “civic virtues” are developed only by a specific type of gardening, namely, that found in communal gardens (in their diverse forms). This makes it difficult to determine the extent in which agriculture per se fosters democratic ways of life, or if these examples simply illustrate the democratic mode of organization perpetuating itself in a virtuous circle, regardless of the activity concerned.

26 One way to answer this criticism would be to claim that agriculture naturally promotes a democratic mode of organization in the first place. Zask criticizes the collectivist organization of agriculture (taking the example of USSR’s kolkhozes) in the second chapter, and intensive industrial farming in the third chapter, for being anti- democratic. In doing so, she seems to be claiming that the democratic organization of agriculture and gardening that she describes throughout her book is somehow congenial to the cultivation of land, while slave plantations, serfdom, collectivism or industrial farming would represent perverted or pathological modes of organization. For example, she claims in the third chapter that the cultivation of land goes against the idea of absolute or exclusive property, and favors instead the fair division and distribution of plots of land (145-7), and hence a certain conception of equality (158-9). While it is an interesting claim, it would deserve a longer and separate demonstration – especially since it has been argued (e.g. by Grotius, or Rousseau) that property, and hence inequality, emerged with the birth of agriculture.

27 Perhaps the scope of the book, as well as its intended audience, could not leave room for such technical demonstrations. What she succeeds in showing in her book is amply sufficient: that the cultivation of land is particularly well-suited for democratic modes of organization; that democratically organized gardens, allotments and farms foster democratic virtues and values; that they thrive particularly well; that historically and

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to this day, farmers are inclined to organize themselves democratically, and offer viable alternatives to anti-democratic and production-driven modes of organization.

AUTHORS

CÉLINE HENNE

History and Philosophy of Science Department, Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge cllh2[at]cam.ac.uk

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Krzysztof Piotr SKOWRONSKI (ed.), John Lachs’s Practical Philosophy: Critical Essays on His Thought with Replies and Bibliography Leiden-Boston, Brill/Rodopi, 2018. pp. XXX + 336

Glenn Tiller

REFERENCES

Krzysztof Piotr SKOWRONSKI (ed.), John Lachs’s Practical Philosophy: Critical Essays on His Thought with Replies and Bibliography, Leiden-Boston, Brill/Rodopi, 2018. pp. XXX + 336

1 Few if any contemporary philosophers have done more to promote American philosophy and philosophy in America than John Lachs. The creativity and sheer industriousness that characterize his sixty-year career as a producer and advocate of both professional and are extraordinary, while his reputation as a teacher of philosophy, especially his work with undergraduate students, is described as “legendary” (p. 21). In the appreciative, probing introductory essay to John Lachs’s Practical Philosophy, Herman Saatkamp Jr. – one of Lachs’s many former students that contribute to this volume – recounts the story of how the student newspaper at Vanderbilt University in its coverage of Lachs a receiving university teaching award attempted to capture his dynamic teaching style. Saatkamp recalls that the “student newspaper published not one photograph but a sequence of photographs of him teaching an introductory class. Each photo captures him almost dancing across the class, raising arms, dramatically pointing out student questions, chalk clacking against the blackboard, all with a positive intensity that invited engagement. The student newspaper got it!” (xxi). Lachs has brought the same energetic intelligence to bear on his seminal work in American philosophy, especially the philosophy of Santayana, and to his articles and books on , medical ethics, the philosophy of

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education, moral philosophy, and much else besides. Significantly, his philosophical energy and acumen are not confined to the lecture room or study. He maintains the conviction that philosophy’s rich history and endless diversity has something to offer to just about everyone. One of his books is titled The Relevance of Philosophy to Life. To some ears this might sound like a rhetorical title in need of a question mark. Not so for the man who once “received a grant to take philosophical discourse to the annual Tennessee Fair […] rented a booth and […] gladly held forth on moral issues” (74). Lachs not only wrote a book on the relevance of philosophy to life, throughout his life he has embodied his philosophical ideals.

2 It is fitting, then, that John Lachs’s Practical Philosophy is indicative of Lachs’s productive life and his philosophically edifying influence on others. The book is the outgrowth of a four-day international conference dedicated to his work that was held in 2015 and organized by the Berlin Practical Philosophy International Forum. (Like William James’s work before him, Lachs’s pragmatist philosophy has found an appreciative audience beyond American shores.) The book is divided into six chapters with eighteen essays on his philosophy by scholars from North America and Europe – a veritable chorus of interlocutors that at turns celebrate and criticize his philosophical positions and theories. The first four chapters address major themes in his philosophy: The Practice of Philosophizing; Philosophical Relationships; Stoic Pragmatism; and Anthropology, Social Ethics, and . The fifth chapter contains an essay on “Immediacy and the Future,” by Phil Oliver, as well as a reply to it by Lachs and his coda to the book, “Death and Self-Importance,” a meditation on the cosmic unimportance of our personal endeavours and the comic importance we sometimes assign to them. The final chapter presents a “Comprehensive Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources” of Lachs’s work. (Lachs reports that he has been “lazy” at different points in his life (28). One wonders when. I counted sixty-nine Ph.D. dissertations that he directed at Vanderbilt University and suspect there are more on the way.) For those familiar with Lachs’s philosophy, this collection is essential for understanding the development of his thought and for providing fresh perspectives on his work; for those who have not encountered his writings before, it will serve as a broad, accessible introduction to his ideas.

3 With the book’s subject being all of Lachs’s philosophy and with such a large assembly of able critics discoursing on a variety of topics, there can be no tidy summary of all that the book contains. The editor’s helpful organization of the book, however, allows the reader, whether he or she is familiar with Lachs’s philosophy or not, easy entry into conversations about the central philosophical ideas that animate his writings. Lachs might not be “thrilled by any isms [sic],” as he retorts to McReynolds who characterizes his philosophy rather cumbersomely as “proto-”; yet he adheres to many of the “isms” associated with classical American philosophy, in particular, pragmatism, fallibilism, and ameliorism (58). It is perhaps “ameliorism” that is the main driver of his philosophical thinking. For he is concerned above all with the individual finding ways to construct a meaningful existence in a life-granting but impersonal cosmos and a vast world of complex social connections.

4 In the Prologue, Lachs states that he agreed to participate in this examination of his ideas on one condition: that his work be vigorously criticized. “I asked that you call attention to my errors,” he writes, “and suggest ways in which they may be corrected.” He adds that he is (mercifully) not asking for “the old APA system of scorching the

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ground from which ideas sprout,” but the other kind of criticism which is “the fair assessment of the value of ideas with suggestions of where they fall short.” He further adds that he has abandoned his views before (e.g. ) and is willing to do so again. Indeed, he claims that “I have read your critiques and started using them,” although it is not always apparent where and how he has begun using the constructive criticisms levelled against him (xxvi).

5 Given the immense task of responding to so many critics on a wide range of topics, it is perhaps not surprising that Lachs’s replies often seem a little clipped when compared to the meticulous expositions of his work. In responding to critics, he tends to reiterate and not amend or further develop his views. For example, Michael Hodges in his essay, “Lachs on Transcendence: Art’s Relation to the Life of Reason,” argues against Lachs that there is an unbridgeable conceptual and moral divide between what Santayana calls “the life of reason” and “the spiritual life.” For Hodges, the former is engaged in pressure-filled self-care while the latter is categorically “disinterested.” “This is a conflict and an unresolvable one,” he states (10). In response to this unresolvable conflict, Lachs simply restates his view that as a matter of fact “battling for good and effortless immediacy […] capture the attention of people at different times and especially different stages of life” (15). Similarly, Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński in his essay, “John Lachs’s Relativism in Philosophical Education as Seen from a Practical Perspective,” argues that some of Lachs’s prescriptions for teachers of philosophy must “transcend particular views or relative statements, and judge them in the name of a common or universal good.” As Skowroński sees it, Lachs “assumes more or less openly” a “universal platform” of values that is the true ground of his prescriptions (65). Lachs’s reply to this charge is a straightforward reaffirmation of his . “We have,” he writes, “a precise answer to the question whether there are universally valid values. There are, to the extent that there are universally shared natures” (74). And in reply to Michael Brodrick’s essay, “Mediation and Its Discontents,” in which Brodrick argues that Lachs’s “lofty ideals” regarding – in particular, having students spend more time actively learning in the community and less time in the classroom - would be detrimental to education of “the traditional liberal kind,” Lachs flatly asserts that “I don’t think that liberal education on the college level must be or should remain intellectual” (258-67). To be sure, at times Lachs does embrace the concerns of his critics, such as with Patrick Shade and his sensitive essay “Facing Death: Preparing for Dying as a Social Process,” but this appears to be mainly because he regards Shade’s critique “as enriching developments of my ideas rather than outright critiques” (283).

6 In a couple of instances, Lachs’s replies appear more defensive than resolute. Andrew Fiala, in his generally laudatory essay “Lachs, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” takes Lachs to task for advocating specific social programs without supporting empirical data. While Fiala praises Lachs as a “deft stylist” – Lachs’s lucid prose style is by design non-technical and he prides himself on writing without footnotes – he objects that when Lachs makes normative claims about social programs such as “public health care, insurance, the social security system, and the food stamp program [in America] […] the footnotes are lacking.” In Fiala’s view, “[d]ebates about such topics require empirical support that must be grounded in empirical data” (103). This claim does not seem particularly controversial, so Lachs’s reply to it is puzzling. He writes that “the test of such theories is not the number of supportive footnotes but their tendency to yield insight,” adding that “no science is objective and salient

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examples convey more immediately accessible information than scientific charts” (114). Setting aside the claim that “no science is objective,” it is unclear why Lachs would be resistant to empirical data indicating whether or not, say, welfare programs promote dependence. After all, empirical data provides “insight” too and the reference to “scientific charts” seems like a straw-man. A similar note of defensiveness also arises in Lachs’s reply to Richard Rubin’s essay “Lachs vs. Santayana.” Lachs has long defended an interpretation of Santayana’s system of philosophy where “matter” is identified with “existence.” Lachs’s interpretation runs contrary to a thesis defended by other Santayana scholars which holds that while “matter” certainly exists it always has some form or “essence.” In Rubin’s estimation, Lachs’s insistence that Santayana must have in mind a “purely ontological idea of matter is […] an imposition of a foreign ontology into Santayana’s using Santayana’s own vocabulary” (120). In his reply to Rubin, Lachs restates his view that matter is “the inarticulate counterpart to essence,” but he also prefaces his restatement with the “wry” comment that “I could not avoid asking myself what difference it would make if I got Santayana’s ideas wrong.” Although he grants that it might “make sense to correct misreadings of Santayana, partly because his ideas are interesting and fruitful and partly because his texts are difficult and his commentators few,” his initial reply seems incongruous with the invitation to criticize his work and the seminal Santayana scholarship he has produced.

7 Santayana once described his own philosophy as “eclectic.” For him, this term wasn’t pejorative, but rather signalled the diverse influences on his thought and his firmness grounding his philosophy in common sense and everyday experience. Lachs’s philosophy is similarly “eclectic.” It is influenced by the entire history of philosophy, albeit with an emphasis on American pragmatism, and more recently Stoicism, and it is grounded in common sense and everyday experience. This allows him to avoid doctrinaire and idiosyncratic assumptions that might lead to intellectual dogmatism and moralism or otherwise distort the clear-minded ideas and practical proposals he presents. Also like Santayana, Lachs in his writing soars to the higher reaches of speculation about the nature of existence and the divine without losing sight of the mundane and the practical interests of human life. Lachs writes that “I have been scribbling for about sixty years, but it will take less than a tenth of that my time for my ideas to be forgotten.” But he adds that “[n]either my authorship nor my specific theories matter so long as my work contributes to the great turn of philosophy away from irrelevant abstraction toward its historical mission of serving as a guide to life” (26). If the essays in the present volume are any indication, he is happily wrong on the first point and certainly correct on the second. Those who wish to see philosophy that is relevant to life flourish both inside and outside the university can take heart knowing that Lachs’s amelioristic ideas have been set in motion.

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AUTHORS

GLENN TILLER

Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi glenn.tiller[at]tamucc.edu

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